This past week has been hellacious.  Bug after bug keeps popping up regarding our product's help system, the area which I have somehow assumed complete responsibility over during the course of the past 6 months.  It's not just the sheer quantity of bugs that's overwhelming me;  it's also the fact that our product is being released in a matter of weeks.  How embarrassing would it be if our product has to delay shipment to wait for my fix, or if a customer pops open the help window to find a blank screen?!  At this point, any code fixes will require approval from some high level executive, the senior vp I believe.  I have been praying that I can be an effective witness for God in the workplace, but this wasn't how I envisioned my relationship with the execs would begin.

Some people are probably eager to point out that my ownership of this area could be the very reason why it's so buggy.  Maybe.  I don't think so though.  All of my code was working fine until they asked me to make a big change at the last second.  It's not my fault we haven't had as much time to test this as the other features.  It's not my fault the help system requires a ton of memory and so is often the first thing to fail.  It's not my fault!  I really need that assurance right now.  If my boss were to tell me this, I think it'd play out very much like the climactic moment between Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting, where I melt into a soppy mess of tears and snot.  Except my boss would only have to say it once.

One particular bug that's been haunting me has been a nightmare.  It's nondeterministic, so we don't know how to reproduce it consistently.  Even if we fix it, we wouldn't know if it's fixed, or if it just hasn't decided to rear it's bugly head yet.  This type of bug ranks as the #2 worst class of bugs, with the bugs assigned to Alvin Chyan as the obvious winner for worst bugs ever.  What's worse, in order to gather more information about it, I'd need to pull some strings and then restart the product for my changes to take effect.  But once restarted, the bug goes away, so I have to wait for it to show up again.  Today, I was finally able to get the bug to reproduce in an environment where I had all the debugging tools setup, so I didn't have to restart the product again.  Now I can assign it to someone else to look at.  No more waiting in my cube until the QA team in China comes to work so I can correspond with them.  Thank goodness.

Despite all these tragedies, I still feel like I've been really blessed at work.  I keep finding myself getting lucky.  For instance, I get assigned a bug that's totally not in my domain.  I spend time looking at it, but I'm relatively stress-free because I feel like I'm doing someone else a favor.  A week or so later, I find that the information I learned from triaging that other bug helps immensely for my own task.  Another example was that something tangential would come up that would remind me of a fix I needed to make.  I almost forgot to include the translated help documents with our product, and it was just a small subset of the help files that might have been overlooked by the testers otherwise.

In conclusion, it's not my fault.  And I'm actually not as emo as I may sound.  Please don't pity me haha.