I resign

Remember I said that today (June 29) is a special day. It’s the launch of the iPhone !!! To me it’s also a special day, personally.

Let me explain..

I program for a living. I love programming and am very happy to take on new projects and code from scratch. However, lately there is little ‘love’ in sitting down at the computer staring at strange codes.

The reason is that the codes are not mine. It’s someone else’s code. To a programmer this must be the biggest nightmare - to debug another colleague’s coding. That’s not so bad if all the programmers follow a certain coding standard. However in real life this is not the case. What I’m debugging now is a mess or ‘rojak’ code. It’s like eating a fish full of sharp bones.

Hmm.. using chess analogy: It’s like taking over someone else’s chess game in the middlegame stage but that person messed up the game and the position is losing. The problem is that you cannot take over and resign. The team captain tells you that it’s a life and death situation where you have to change this losing position to at least a draw. I’ve been taking over a lot of this lost games and have saved almost all of them.

That’s a very close analogy to what I’m facing now. Is that stressful or what? To me, I think it’s logical that if you wrote the code, you should fix any errors that crop up. In chess, you start the game, you finish it. It’s just illogical to have someone else take over,

Anyway, I’m very satisfied with my work. It’s a great achievement to me, to fix hopeless codes written by other people and to top it off under time pressure!! The codes are so hopeless that the original programmers themselves don’t want to touch it.

Unfortunately, I’ve been getting blamed for taking too long to fix the codes and letting some of the bugs slip thru. In other words for every 10 games I take over I lose one or two games.

I feel this is very unfair. I give up. I push down my King. So, after thinking long and hard I’ve decided to hand in my resignation today and take a two month vacation before deciding what I want to do next..

My resignation is with one month’s notice from today, meaning by August, I will be free to blog on chess full time (at least for a month or two)

Good timing too as this will be DATMO/AmBank challenge time !!

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