I just have to write this post right this now, it can’t wait because tomorrow it won’t feel like does now. You’ll know what I mean in just a few seconds, read on.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a hotel, being on a business trip to Milan. It’s a decent quality three star hotel, I am particularly happy with the WiFi in the room. The last three star hotel I stayed in also claimed to have WiFi, and that turned out to be only in the lobby, between 9 and 5, and the connection was so bad that I got better reception sitting outside the hotel so I could connect to the router of the hotel next door.
I arrived yesterday evening. To not lose quality office time on things that in an ideal world should have been ready before this trip, I began configuring and kicked off the build system that makes the software I’m here to work with. It didn’t get far. Sat up way too late with very little progress. Then today I spent the whole day in an office, struggling to make it work… small steps forward, one thing solved, on to the next, slowly slowly. I really hate that pace. If I was with my team, I wouldn’t be the one solving these issues, I’m not very familiar with the inner workings of the build system of this quite huge project, that’s not why I was sent on this trip. It should just work, but with a new environment, missing pieces of software and different external parameters, you know!
Going back to the hotel I wasn’t very happy with the achievements of the day, the only comfort is that I actually couldn’t have done much else today because some equippment was missing that won’t be there until tomorrow. I felt close to the complete solution though, there aren’t that many Make targets after the one I was stuck on. The error message was new to me though - “Argument list too long”. What!? Eh, there’s only one argument, it can’t be that the one argument is too long, can it? It was a path, and it was long, it could be it. When I came back to the hotel I moved stuff around to get the path shorter and triggered a build, then I went out.
I came back a while ago and guess what… Build complete! That was the last obstacle. It’s late, I’m tired but oh so good it feels that I can start tomorrow with all pieces of the puzzle ready to kick a**!
Good night!
