Sometimes David just rocks! A few days ago he presented me this lego sculpture saying: "look dad, it's a spaceship!"
Although I know for a fact he has jet to see his first StarTrek the resemblance is uncanny.
We are Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated...
Having a child is an exercise in chaos. If you're a software developer you will probably not even notice any change in your daily routine. It's basically all that's wrong with project management at your workplace. Late night refactorings, ever changing specs, volatile project scope, improbable deadlines and virtually no chance of success. Still you probably end up finishing every project no mater how mismanaged. Somehow things get done and the jumbled mess of incomprehensible code produces the desired output. On strings, prayer sand a roll of duck tape, you get through it and you live to fight another project.
That’s until you encounter concurrency computing.
If you’re a competent developer you know that threads are evil. But they pale in comparison with daily challenges of multi-offspring household. Having n > 1 children is a like developing a multithreaded application – with a few twists. In this case you’re the CPU processing the requests (this is where being married dual core pays off!), there’s no logging, exceptions are constant and unrelenting. Fixing a bug just means you’ve neglected to take care of something else. Being used to chaos you persevere – but invariably you burn out and fail.
It’s amazing how simple the problems you face at work seem to the veterans of n > 1 children families. Everything else is dead simple. Also you learn to appreciate your spouse. At the end of the day – she puts on her cape and turns into a superhero that saves the day. Barely being able to keep your eyes opened you gaze at the better half of your dynamic duo – she looks out of this world. You can finally close your eyes and take a nap. Her multitasking superpowers defeat the chaos. Your final thought before you daze into the never-land is: “She’d be an amazing programmer…”
This is pretty much every project I've worked on:
And it accurately describes what having kids is all about. Whenever you think you've worked something out the landscape changes. You're back in the wild, it's getting dark and a low roar of the beast is heard in the distance...
Just a quick note to let you know my new blog is online. readable code is my C# blog and is more technical in nature. If you're interested in checking out the first 3 installments to my Building a Regular Expression Random Data Generator series head over there now and leave some comments!
As I'm sure you are blissfully unaware of - project Ivy is now called Ema. The last internal build was on Monday and we shipped Tuesday. There was no party, no confetti, no champagne (just some prescribed medication for mom). I might be biased but the final product turned out great. We missed the deadline by 4 days which I'm sure you'll agree is practically on schedule but we are feature complete (we've got voice recognition and emission tested, waste management system on-line, food intake running...) so I'm congratulating myself on a job well done!
Also we've changed our url, but that's a topic for the next post with the working title: My life is a box, (Boxing Goran?).
Also I'm internetless! For the first time in 8 years I'm offline. Well not completely off line as I got my mobile phone and this UMTS card for my laptop. But I feel as if I'm all alone and naked in the dark... OK. That was waaay off topic.
So no pictures till I get my computer running again, which is incredibly low on mom's priority list. So as soon as I set up the kitchen, build that rack, fix the sink and move that TV - you'll be the first to know.
David is definitely going through his dino phase. I fondly remember mine. Dinosaurs are all he thinks about all day. Here's a wonderful example of a Diplodocus...
It's still lego and it's still dino's but I'm much happier with the latest development. I'm sure you'll notice there is no cave men lurking around eager to play with the diplodocus. Yay!
Dad 1 : creationism 0.
Our countdown to project ivy has just returned an unhandled exception. We have passed zero and we're counting upwards.
On a side note we're also (4 days) late on moving-to-a-new-house project. I'm sure you'll notice that neither of these is my fault!
But being a bit late in a project is nothing new to us software developers. Now why is that? I'm sure we've all read books on project estimations, multiplied our estimates by pi, threatened to quit if project scope gets out of hands again. Still none of this makes a difference. The problem is that projects get late by the actions (or lack of actions) of people who have no vested interest in meeting the deadline. The guys that pour concrete don't care about me moving in. My boss keeps forgetting I have a life. And I guess "ivy" will come out whenever she's ready and isn't aiming for the due date.
