10apr19

Almost started as a pretty decent day. Turned out an offshore tester couldn't log in last night, so spent a fair chunk of this morning trying to debug why. Boiled down to "no idea".

I redid the big problematic rebase that three devs (including me) have been banging their head on for two days. It involved programatically skipping a bunch of duplicated commits in the branch's history. In total, I reduced the commit count by more than half.

Then, during the afternoon's "omg the sky is falling" testing meeting, it was decided that we need to have a call with that tester immediately. Except by then it's 02:30 his time. So instead, we'll have a call as soon as he's in the office. Which is 21:00 for us on pacific time. It's just assumed I'll be there, and my delivery manager will be there. We're not asked, nobody checks if this is acceptable. Fine, whatever.

I get some more work done, then go ready to go to dinner. A little before 18:00, I get an email from our "Head of Platform Experience", once again attributing the failures found in test to the safety mechanisms I put in place in December. Needless to say, these leaves me livid. Half an hour later, while at dinner, I get an email from my grandboss, the CTO, asking "what is path to closure on this" [sic]. Basically covering his ass, as far as I can tell, but which very nearly results in either a high-velocity aerial cellphone or my rage-quitting via email. Instead, I waited until I got home and reply-alled to Brian with the details of why these problems weren't related to the safeties, and - hopefully - subtly indicating that it upsets me when he assumes they are.

Dinner, I have to say, was disappointing. Loree and I went to Cheesecake factory, and while the cheeseburger spring rolls are still excellent, the bacon-bacon cheeseburger was bland. How can you make bacon bland? I've had precooked microwavable bacon that had more flavor. The beef wasn't even worth discussing. Even the fries were flavorless. About the only thing on the plate that tasted like anything was the ketchup, and it wasn't enough to rescue the fries.

So, came home, sent my email, and we had the call. It lasted less than 15 minutes, because the tester a) was able to log in with no problems and b) immediately started running into errors that I'd said would come up as soon as someone deployed a change (and which was why I'd avoided deploying it). So, now I'm waiting while a Synechron dev makes the changes to handle those, so I can code review it, and then deploy.