The Lair

Like most practicing software engineers today; I’ve worked with version control before. Only, I’ve been involved in commercial projects with lots of rules (mandated automatic checkouts, lots of JUnit tests run before and after changes) and a fair degree of stricture.

Today, I uh … checked in a piece of code to a public open source project. As per my luck, this piece of code promptly barfed and left a messy stain on the keyboard and carpet. Not to mention more than a little egg on my face.

Can you imagine the stress that people face when there is a deadline looming and they’re scrambling to finish something? Trust me, it’s nothing compared to the feeling of utter panic that sets in whch you realize that you’ve ummm.. broken the build for potentially hundreds of people and you’d better fix it. toot sweet. And the tooter, the sweeter.

Some faffing around and ineffectual flailing later, I actually backed out the broken changes, tested, checked out to make sure there were no subsequent revisions, tested again and committed. Order was restored. Apparently, this process took 40 minutes. It seemed like much less at the time. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen before a few bleeding edge SVN updating hawks had noticed the breakage. Gah. BURRRRRN.

According to the Pragmatic Programmers, breaking the nightly build gets the luckless developer an award of a dunce cap. I think I’ll hunt around for some headgear for the rest of the day.