The problem with getting started with any project is, not surprisingly, getting started.
If I’m coding, the problem is trying to figure out what I’m trying to code. That sounded so circular, but most of my scripting projects are handed to me like ‘I need this file to do X.’ By in large, that’s easy and I can think ‘Okay, so I’ll make a script that says ‘hey, file, do you have X? No, here, now you do.’ Done!’ And of course, ten minutes later I think ‘But … what if that file doesn’t exist?’ then I have to script an additional ‘if file x exists’ catch. And then come the error messages ‘You ass!’ and so on and so forth.
This is why, IMO, you get code bloat.
When I’m writing, it’s worse. I can usually see the middle of my story. I want to talk about writer’s block. Okay. How do you get into that topic? Actually, I don’t have a block today, I have about six stories I’ve started and are in various stages of completion. What I need is more time. That’s for another day.
A couple months ago we were at a big meeting, and I was bored as fuck. Seriously big. We’re talking 300 people in the room, all listening to other people get allocates for their work, knowing that we (and by this I mean my immediate coworkers) will get the shaft again. And it’s not even Samuel L. Jackson. Bitches. I’m resigned to this for the foreseeable future. The joke is last month my (now former) team finally got their accolades … and no one mentioned our names. They’d spent a week being all ‘Hey, you’re getting thanked! In public! You get an award!’ And we got a team award. These paper awards. Cheap. And only one for the 25 of us who busted our asses for 6 months. And is it any shock I quit?
Oh, no, same company, new digs.
I love my new digs. I love my bosses, most of my coworkers, and the work. I’ve lost weight, gotten tan, and I feel generally better about things. I didn’t realize how crappy my old job was until I left. I work more hours now, but it doesn’t feel like more hours because the environment is better suited to my temperament. Oh! And I get to code more!
This week, our Number One Guy is out and I, the plebe, am asked to debug code. I felt so terrified. I printed up the workflows, I studied the code line by line (it’s only 100 lines, so pretty small) and I understood it all! Then I wrote the fix. Ran it once. Found one problem, fixed it. Wham. Done. And then the next day I did it again for another thing.
I felt so damn smart!
Then I got home and shit happened, but that’s what shit does.
On the home code front, I wanted to make something ‘like’ a chess game, where multiple people can move counters around a grid. Put them on or off as they wanted. It took me two days to code the PHP and SQL the way I wanted, and it looks fucking awesome. The first day was the worst. I stared at the code, made a list of everything I wanted to do, dreaded the complexity and so on and so forth.
Some days, I’m really on the spot.
Then I upgraded the forums at JFO and damn it, everything but the auto-open feature works. Piss. Must look into it. Still five days of code headache isn’t that big when you think that most of it was formatting problems and not actual code.