The past few days have been horribly boring, development wise. New project excitement has faded; new technology excitement has been benched. I’m just sitting behind the keyboard and and making it happen. Bread and butter time, and my morale is soaring. Boring repetitive work is the enemy of the automation programmer.
I’ve been doing all of my development without the aid of outside 3rd party software, such as NHibernate, NUnit, or whatever other plug-ins you can Google for. All of the SPROCs, database maintenance, testing, and other tasks are done by hand. The primary reason is future maintainability. My term at the company comes to an end in early August; other programmers are going to be stuck managing my handiwork. I don’t want to drop new programs on them as well as new code.
Programming without basic automation utilities is rough. I spent a few hours today writing SELECT/INSERT procedures for the database, one at a time. I’m at twenty-seven tables and rising; the numbers are killing me. Not to mention what happens when I need to make a database change. Despite my massive one week planning period, there are still data model changes to be made. It’s annoying. If I add a single column, I end up changing code in four places: two in SQL Server Management Studio, and two in the C# Data Access Object. And then any calls I’ve made to the INSERT or UPDATE functions. It’s a total timewaster, compounded by the fact that I only compile/run when absolutely necessary.
Ah, absolute necessity. My development machine is a 2.4ghz P4 with 768MB DDR. It’s a laptop, complete with 5400RPM drive. Once I get the basics up and running (Visual Studio 2005.NET, SQL Server Management Studio Express & related instance, explorer, iexplorer x 2, and WMP11) I’m out of RAM. It takes more than thirty seconds after hitting F5 (Run with Debugging Enabled) for the browser to load. It truly is development hell. Thankfully, I’ve learned not to hit CTRL+SHIFT+B (Build Solution) every few lines.
Having such a crap machine limits my multitasking. If I work in Visual Studio for more than a few minutes, SSMSE gets paged to disk. If a database change is necessary, I’m looking at two or three minutes wasted just waiting for programs to page back and forth. It’s maddening. There are points where my processor is so laden GMail won’t stay connected. Not being able to automate the boring stuff and doing it by hand blows hardcore. If I ever start developing professionally start a development company, every workstation is going to be riced out, save video card. I just can’t stand working on a machine where I can type faster than Intellisense.
It’s just been boring, repetitive, slow work. Thankfully, I’m probably going to finish up most (ha!) of the boring parts this weekend. Come Monday, I’ll be working in new exciting territory again. No wonder people get all excited about Haskell and Ruby and whatever other language of the month is. Anything that auto-magics this tedious part of programming is worth raving about, no matter what constraints are put on style/syntax/format.
Print | posted on Saturday, May 26, 2007 12:58 AM