Flying Bug

Suddenly there come so many production issues, seems this is always the same for each launch, I got feeling that we were not doing good job on testing.

Now I’m working on at least 1 P0 and 2 P1, may be some more P1 around but I just don’t have time to check out their priority, so far everything pointed to same piece of library we are using, and we suspect it was not well tested before heading to production.

Now I can image this piece of codes will keep being blamed for some while, till it proves itself is robust. This happened to our components before, that everybody blamed us even if it is nothing to do with us, and just because we made some stupid mistakes. Have to say, this is fair – statiscally, bugs always come from where they came from.

I don’t have enough time to finish project plan and some design documents – our achitect is just too busy to give me detailed design so we made an agreement that I will do it, but he will review. I just wish I have some time tomorrow to get draft done, otherwise I will be the bottleneck of the project.

Another project is moving smoothly, it seems running small project is always efficient as there would be less interact with other teams, which make things happen faster.

Started (again) with Ada, installed gnat-gps on both Ubuntu and Windows, let’s see how far I can go this time.

Here comes a weird, or maybe crazy idea – I want to try to rewrite previous music player with Ada and win32ada binding. Previous one was writted in C++ and Win32 API, thinking of I didn’t use any MFC/ATL stuffs, it should be easier, and this is the best route to me to know more about Ada.

Actually I did some research, compared Lisp and Ada, and finally decided to go with Ada as it may help me in finding a job in the future, while Lisp may help me get a degree from some colleges. I don’t think I will go to school soon, so I picked Ada.

Both languages are not that commonly used in sillicon valley I guess, but I always believe being minority is not bad. 😛

Cannot believe they have done the moving and my desktop is back online.

It’s always a pain while moving is happening, I lost my mail filters as fetchmail is not running, and I have to rely on Outlook’s (or Exchange’s?) crappy web interface, I also lost my home directory as it is still on my desktop.

There was a survey days back, asking if anyone want to volunteer to moving deskptop system to a VM. It’s a good idea to me especially putting it on a server which has better SLA. I would like you see my home directory moving to a central NFS server, and have two VM with full control, so that I can just switch to another VM whenever there is anything happens to the primary one.

Anyway, should move the home directory first.

Have to say, we are lucky.

One of my colleagues started her sick leave this time last year, and she got notification from HR that her employment had been terminated as maximum is just 12 months.

I cannot say that company is doing anything wrong as I heard of everything is in written and got signed by both sides, but …

We are lucky, we still have a job in this endless down turn; we are lucky as we are still healthy, at least we are healthy enough to go to office to keep the job; we are lucky that our family members are all in good shape. Yes we are lucky.

Then here comes the topic that I don’t want to put in the subject – it may still be a great company, but it’s full of “professional” employees now and I can see the sad future of the company if nothing changed in near future. I was and am working hard, but definitely I won’t, at least take care of myself much more better than before – no work over time, no extra working hours during the weekend, never be stressful whenever there is anything happens to production. Why? It is because of I have to take care of myself as my company does not care about me at all. No matter how hard I was working for the company, someone else would just simply follow the so-called policy. Then yes, I will follow the policy, that is, 9am to 6pm.

I was always childish, naive, but now have to be a little bit relastic.

I believe this becomes first priority now – I need to have a plan to manage all INT/QA environments to make sure they are following production engineer’s standard so that we can reproduce/verify production issues without any sort of hacks.

Won’t be a easy job, but it will be fun, it will include how to cooperate with SecoDB, how to extract most meaningful data, and how to maintain distro pipeline or quick (hourly?) bootstrap.

I need to make sure I have enough bandwidth dealing with all 3 projects I have, and more important, I need to have a preference of projects so in case I have to give up some projects, it won’t take me too much time to make the decision.

Be prepared is always a good thing.