self-pity, mostly
Work has been especially frustrating the last week or so. I'd managed last Monday to solve a small problem that was very important to one of our customers. This made me feel quite good about myself, which is important since I hadn't been making much progress in the preceding weeks. When I tried to see if my solution worked, though, I found that nothing worked at all. The entire product was broken.
I reverted my changes and went back to build the offending library again, based on what should be the code that was shipped out for our last release (which was nearly two years ago for this particular thing). It didn't work either. This was a small relief because, while something was horribly wrong, at least it wasn't my fault. On the other hand, if it had been something I'd done, it'd been a lot easier to fix. I knew what I'd done, after all. I have no idea what happened nearly two years ago, and no one who might have worked on it is still around to offer advice.
Now I'm at a loss. I've been beating my head against this thing for a week now. It's not giving an inch. I've been trying to build related libraries thinking that maybe my library got out of synch in some way I wouldn't think would be likely. The only thing that's accomplished is to turn up more problems, proving that the mess I'd inherited is far more widespread that I'd have guessed. I have no idea how this stuff ever worked, and the two-year-old CD that proves that it did once is only there to taunt me. It's my job to fix this, but I don't really know where to start.
So I decided to post a small journal entry instead of thinking about it. It seemed like the best thing to do, under the circumstances.