I understand that most of you won’t understand this, but that’s okay. This post is for me!

At work I was put in a rough situation. If you tried to dream up the hardest, most ridiculous scenario for a programmer to be in as some kind of thought exercise, it would probably be better than what I had to deal with.

1. The bug dealt with a goofy setup of a program that is pretty bad to begin with. So dealing with the program itself would be bad, but it was made worse by having the most counter-intuitive setup you could think of.
2. The program has a huge history to wade through, with tons of legacy databases, none of which I am familiar with. So the tree sort of gets lost in the forest.
3. The program uses abstract terminology that I’ve never encountered.
4. The API to the program is in a proprietary language which I don’t know.
5. The person who wrote the original code now lives in a different country.
6. I was working under a deadline, namely, the end of the day. No pressure.
7. I don’t have the program to interface with here at work. The guy who does have access to the program, doesn’t have a debugger. So neither of us are really in a position to debug.
8. Did I mention that the program I’m supposed to access is in a different state? So, we are trying to work via a web conference. I can see his screen, but he can’t see mine. I basically send him files to try, which inevitably doesn’t work, rise, repeat.
9. The guy on the other end of the web conference with the access to the tool isn’t a programmer, nor does he know anything about the program to interface with. So we are like the blind leading the blind.

So, to summarize, I have one day to fix a bug in code I didn’t write that interfaces with a horrible, backwards, customized, proprietary program which I’ve never used and don’t understand, and also which has a lot of history and obscuring details. On top of that, I don’t have direct access to the program, but I’m using an intermediary to type things for me in a different state, which I watch through a web meeting.

And I did it, baby. I did it. It took like 6 hours, but it got done. Booya!

And you reading this, much like my boss, probably had no clue how hard it was. Oh well.