Holidays and Software Development

Software testing and release time, like a cultural holiday, brings its own traditions and, even if software development is your full-time job, takes you into a state that’s outside of your daily existence. I’m back in school this year, of course, but last year and the year before that I was doing fairly (emotionally, if not cognitively) stressful development around Christmas, and it’s interesting how Christmas season and debugging season can seamlessly mesh into one another, creating an ascetic state of heightened stress that is both frazzled and strangely fuzzy. After about one-half to one week of hammering anxiety and sleeplessness, your nerves become mercifully burnt; you achieve both Zen mind and an odd delirium. Once you experience it, you kind of understand why geek humor tends to be so weird.

The frazzled nerves tend to come more from the ambient business stress than problems in the code. Even the smoothest of releases is a tense thing, with lots of business interests at stake, while debugging these days, at least for Web applications, is often pretty easy. It’s not like the old days — at least, it’s not like the mythology of the old days that I hear about all the time, where you apparently had to decode binary regurgitation on punch cards or something like that. Most development environments and application servers nowadays give you rich and meticulous stack traces that point you exactly where you need to fix the problem.

This is not to say that debugging is never hard work — there are always the invisible goblins, the bugs that mess it all up while expertly hiding themselves from your view. These usually pop up when the system is smoothly executing what you’ve told it to do — it’s just not what you intended to tell it to do.

Then there’s just the crap that happens when your application server, or your Web server, or your third-party libraries are doing things they are not supposed to be doing, and the documentation doesn’t say anything about the error. When I hit those I just have to read this comic over and over until the anxiety goes away.