(identity 'myron)

Tue, 18 Nov 2003

Seething with rage [/tech]

I'm about to go homicidal right now, as the problems I've been running into for the past few days have all been because another person's code is linked against an older version of a library while mine is using a newer one. I couldn't see this because I'm building my project as a dll, and the other guy's project simply calls my functions. So of course when his dll loads my dll, the common library that both link against presents a problem as mine calls newer, seemingly non-existant functions.

The stupidest thing is that the dll is being loaded as a plugin at runtime through a third party closed-source app whose debugging messages amount to, "Failed to load x.dll", which totally hides the fact that there's a dll version mismatch.

So no one can be blamed for this directly but I'd say it's 10% my fault for not thinking of this earlier, 20% the 3rd party's fault for not making any decent debugging facilities available, 70% my stupid fscking coworker who never fscking updates his code with the rest of the fscking group and is too fscking stupid to tell me anything when I ask him if there's anything fscking special about his fscking crappy-ass code. I guess I should take more blame for even asking him or trusting his code at all. Stupid me.

// posted at 17:00. permalink   comments

ARGH [/tech]

Sometimes programming just simply sucks. After 3 days of battling with a bug that's almost impossible to pin down, I'm almost ready to change professions. I'm not all that experienced quite yet, but I'm quite sure of the following:

• Program with people you trust. Everyone from third party outsourcers (if you use them) to the person right beside you to the people above you. The sucky code of today is the code you'll be staring at on the screen, banging your head against the monitor tomorrow. And crappy boses too removed from technical aspects are useless.
• Do not trust people who do not evaluate their options before developing on Windows, especially those that go straight for Visual C++. Again, can't trust 'em, don't program with them. Remove them with cold war social tactics or remove yourself and find another job.
• Avoid working with closed source libraries/projects/products. If your project depends on something and it's closed source, you're completely at the mercy of some impersonal company or anonymous programmer if you run into problems with their code.

I'm sure there's more but I'm too annoyed at the moment to think of them.

// posted at 03:19. permalink   comments