Stuck at work tonight until at least 6:30, so why not blog a bit?
Reality has hit me pretty hard since returning from my vacation…work has been a succession of 10 hour days followed by exhaustion.
Yeah, I know…wah, wah, wah…everyone has to work. I accept that.
Here’s the thing: The one thing you fight a losing battle against in software development is entropy. No matter how brilliant the inital design, if you keep adding things to a given system, eventually you must throw the whole thing out. It’s sheer thermodynamics–systems tend to move from order to disorder. As you get further and further down that slide, it requires more and more effort to maintain the status quo.
So, that’s where I’m stuck. We’ve change a few small things in our software concerning how it’s built, moving from the older nmake utility, which is better suited to compiling C and C++, to the snazzy new Ant tool, which is better for Java projects. It’s been a very positive comraderie experience, as we’ve all learned about how our product works, but it’s been hellish to implement.
Basically, it’s been like trying to retool an 80 year old assembly line. There are three people we’ve had to go through to get this done, because we don’t control all the parts of the assembly line.
We knew it was going to be a pain, but not this much of a pain!