My most recent "hot" work task (adding useful logging and reporting of the communication between our main box and it's little sidekick) has taken me several weeks to get nailed down and working, including one all-nighter and some extreme hours this last week. But, baring a brown paper bag bug, it's done, it works, it's checked in.

It's important that this little sidecar work right, as we just today issued the press release announcing it's availability to the customers of one of our MSOs.

So today, my boss asks me about some other little feature we need for it to have. It's actually a feature that it was kind of dumb of us not to have put in it in the first place. (It outputs a teevee signal, normally to channel 3, but switchable to channel 4. When reset or powercycled, it switched back to channel 3. He wanted to know how hard it would be to have that value "stick".)

Most of my projects at work are the sort of thing that sound easy until I dig into them, at which the complexity and hair and ugliness "hidden under the hood" turn them into multiweek projects. In this case, the reverse happened, what sounded like a potential nightmare, I finished in less than an hour. It took more time to get it cross integrated between our development and shipping branches, and get the various code reviews and approvals signed off, than it took to right.


But as elfs warned me, "Whenever you prove you can walk on water, they start expecting you to go hike across the lake every morning to get coffee."