Day[19] Capstoned

I’m in a daze right now. A concentration daze. My mind has been squeezed for two solid days and there is still so much more to do.

Argun and I were off to a good start on the second day of our Vending Machine project. We had nearly all the basics functioning pretty well by lunchtime. We had each agreed that we could work till seven. After lunch, with six or so hours stretching before us, it seemed likely that we were going to finish without a weekend trip to Tech Elevator.

Then reality set in.

I ran into a problem with dispensing the change. We had to return the dollars as numbers (no problem) and the change in coins (big problem). I wrote the War and Peace of C# Methods trying to solve this issue. It’s not what you would call elegant. After two hours and a lot of tweaking, it pretty much worked. But it took quite a toll on my mental well-being.

While I was doing this, Argun struggled on another piece of the code. We teamed up on his and got that end working too. Eventually.

Then the real fun began.

When two programmers work on the same piece of code at the same time using two different computers, a version control system must be the go-between to merge all the work into one piece of software. The version control we use at Tech Elevator is called Git.

Git is tricky. It’s often said that if you become good with Git, everyone will love you at your job. Another way to say that is, Git is a pain in the ass and everyone hates it.

Every time Argun and I merged our code, half an hour was spent untangling the mess of error messages and duplicate code showing up in curious places all over the program.

We’re meeting on Sunday to continue work. If all goes well, we have two to three hours of work. If things go poorly, we’ll work for five or six hours and still have to query Tom on Monday.

One month in, two and a half to go.