Spend the first half of the day killing bugs in an application that we are developing. Luckely for me, these bugs happen to be in one of the ugliest looking editor screens that I have ever seen. I have the right to say this because I created this horrid looking thing myself. Had to model it after an existing form already in use in another application so I didn’t really get to redesign it even though I really wanted to. I just pushed some buttons being the good little coding monkey that I am and made a new thing to look just as ugly as the old thing. Yeah! Go monkey coding power!
I was able to fabricate a vastly more attractive and reasonably functioning prototype screen in no time at all for everyone to shoot on but some people would rather spend time with way too long meetings with way too many people involved trying to discuss way too many things at the same time. It often leads to a whole day of talking and tends to suck the life out of me. I think I will evolve the prototype into a fully functioning replacement and hopefully prove that the new version is a lot better than the old one because I’m really starting to dislike working on that thing.
It’s not all gloomy though. There is now a reasonably structured and ongoing effort to improve the overall code base which has a lot of broken windows. At least the interface is looking sleek again and are almost fully up-to-date with our dependency libraries. We are now strictly using Subversion for source control combined with Trac for some basic bookkeeping. Even better yet, my project lead and I agreed on an iterative development scheme with cycles of two weeks which looks an awful lot like the process described by Tobias Mayer on his Agile Thinking Blog.