Thanks to the reading I’ve been doing, and the source code that fellow pilot-geek Kris Johnson sent me, I think I’m starting to get my head around Objective C, if not the iPhone development environment. I answered my first Objective C question on Stack Overflow, and got over 12 upvotes and an accepted answer. Too bad I hit my daily reputation cap. But Kris saw my post almost immediately and commented on my new-found knowledge of Objective C.
The iPhone part is coming along nicely. I’m about halfway through the iPhone Application Programming Guide, and after that there are a couple more papers on the iPhone developer site to read. It might soon be time to start writing some test apps.
After work, I went to the gym and did Dan’s recommended light weights but more sets workout on the machines. The gym is a lot more crowded than it was in December – I wonder if this is just the New Years Resolution crowd, or just that there weren’t a lot of students around in December because of exams and end of quarter work-loads?
And in between, work sucked less than it had been. I got assigned a bug from the “BAU” (which I’m told stands for “Business As Usual”) group, which unlike the “Maintenance group”, actually seems to have some standing in the company.
In the Maintenance group, if you wanted help from somebody in charge of a design document, you had to preface your request with an explanation that you were only Maintenance, so they didn’t have to interrupt anything important to answer you. 50% of the bugs assigned to me are unreproducible, either because they were fixed under different report numbers, or I don’t know enough about some areas of the product to figure out how to reproduce the bug and can’t bother people who do know because I’m just “Maintenance”. Another 25% get put on hold after I figure out the fix because the fix involves a view change, which requires a review from the DBA group, and the DBA group aren’t going to give any priority to reviewing it because I’m just “Maintenance”. And have I mentioned that the bugs I fixed in the first two weeks are finally getting code reviewed on Thursday, 2.5 months after they were fixed? With any luck, they might even get checked into the code for the April release. (And no, I’m not kidding – that’s where I’m told they’re going to go if I can get them approved by code freeze in March.)
Now compare that to my first BAU bug. The bug report had some conflicting information, so I did some research in the design documents. That also had conflicting information, so I was able to have a meeting with one of the designers, and exchange some email with the “owner” of some other part of the functionality. From that, I was able to resolve some of the ambiguity, and decide on a plan of action. There are both GUI and back-end issues in this bug, and I’ve told them I want to fix both sets of issues instead of just the actual “headline” issue, and they agreed. And I get the feeling that there will be more help if I run into other obstacles. I feel positively giddy.