Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Sorry about that downer entry below!

The task I'm working on right now is truly mindnumbing and it's really hurting my brain to keep so much data in my short term neural buffers, and not being on my usual drug cocktail throws my game off a little. It's not that it's compicated in and of itself — in fact it's a relatively simple change conceptually — but it involves small changes across massive pieces of legacy code (which is very convoluted and spaghetti-like, and tens of thousands of lines long with many old versions commented out inside it), and to make matters worse, in order to make it work, I've had to port it to a new compiler.

I'd been using the same compiler I use for the IAM software because of its ability to create incredibly tight and fast code, but unfortunately this software has become so bloated that it won't compile any more. That's not an error I enjoy getting — it brought me flashbacks from 1992, when one of my companies essentially collapsed because at the exact moment we hit this same wall with our flagship product (an IVR system), Microsoft decided to stop supporting our compiler of choice!

It was insane; to fix a “bug” (compiler error) in one part of the code, I'd have to just flip random bytes elsewhere in the sourcecode to make it compile. Shockingly we kept it stable enough to ship, but it meant we couldn't effectively expand the product and had to freeze it.

Anyway… I'd say I have the transition to the new maintenance software about 65% done and anticipate completing it tomorrow.