Grinding

It’s noble work you’re doing.

I got to play around with Visual Studio and C# at work today, started get­ting my mind around the mas­sive col­lec­tion of APIs that is .NET — and hat­ing the MSDN site’s hor­ren­dously slow-loading doc­u­men­ta­tion pages. Ordinarily I’d rather shoot myself than develop for a win­dows machine, but I’ve got no choice but to hold my nose and learn both C# and VB​.NET. C# at least has a famil­iar syn­tax, and OOP is pretty straight­for­ward. In short, it’s not a large pile of kludges des­per­ately try­ing to main­tain the famil­iar COBOL-like syn­tax (yes, that is bit­ing sar­casm folks).

The VS designer fea­ture is pretty slick, but that’s prob­a­bly just because it blunts the sharp­ness of “blank page” syn­drome (freez­ing up for lack of a place to start).

Tomorrow I get to test a fea­ture request (again, on the sta­ble branch) for a large cus­tomer before I get a chance to work on the next release again. Oh yeah, and this par­tic­u­lar fea­ture is a re-do of an ear­lier fea­ture request the same com­pany had me do, but dif­fer­ent. Fuckers.

Wednesday I’ve got a meet­ing with a devel­op­ment house to get a quote on an analy­sis on how much farm­ing out our desk­top appli­ca­tion will end up cost­ing us. (Read that again, slowly.) I fig­ure the big boss will prob­a­bly freeze up when he fig­ures out that he could’ve paid the last guy a quar­ter of what it’s going to end up cost­ing him now.

Advantage: pro­gram­mers.

Fuck. Did I just write that? Did I just totally flip­ping loose it and stum­ble drunk­enly down the lanes of greedheadville.

Shit.

Time to seri­ously re-consider hobo­ing it for a while.