[Personal] Today's work pattern

Today I was working on a supposedly super hot customer issue, an issue that stops customer's production rollout. You know, one so highly visible such that the VPs give a hoot. The entire defect scenario involves about 5 steps to reproduce, and I was given a debug environment with the correct setup.

That machine was so freakishly slow! For one of the steps it could take more than 5 minutes to complete and yet another 10 to recover to a clean state. As any programmer knows, it often takes more than one debug cycle in order to identify the problem, especially if the bug is tricky and unfamiliar. So my day was spent on clicking, waiting a few minutes, analyzing, and clicking again. Who would have thought waiting for a computer could be so tiring?!

By the end of the day I managed to find the defect cause (but not the fix since it's not my area). Y360, Bloglines, and Blogger had prevented me from going crazy.

And that's no April Fool's joke!