It Has Been a Busy Day

And not because of the campaign. My day job involves keeping a collection of tools (about 170 scripts and programs, mostly Korn shell, but some Perl and C, probably totaling 20,000 lines) running. These tools bring together all the code that makes up a laser printer in a consistent manner, including verifying that whatever changes developers make don't break the overall product. It is an incredibly boring job, but someone has to do it.

I wrote some of this code, but much of it was written by other people, and it is sometimes challenging to figure out what particular parts of it are supposed to do. Adding to the aggravation, all the source code is stored in ClearCase, and a display of the all the different branches of this code is like a Los Angeles freeway map (although less logical and harder to navigate). Figuring out which printer is using which element on which branch--or at least which it is supposed to be using--is one of those frustrating exercises that I hate.

There are eight different laser printers under development using this toolset that I am responsible for keeping operational. Much of the time, I am waiting for tests to complete, or for people to respond to questions. There are days when I may only be doing something for a couple of hours--and there days like today, when toolset problems develop simultaneously on four different products--and then I am fully engaged for nine hours.

Most of the time, the work that I do involves analyzing why tools have stopped breaking--and sometimes, reproducing the failures is impossible. All I can do is an autopsy on the results, and hope that I can change the tools to give me more information the next they fail.

Today was, if busy, at least mildly entertaining in places.