As you might have noticed I haven’t done much blogging recently. I am spending a lot of time at work and working while at home.

Earlier this week we learned something we had designed and implemented months ago works for simple cases but in real use it is easily broken. It had to do with some user interface stuff that we didn’t really want to do (our team is working fairly deep down in the O/S). We just didn’t have any UI experience and the UI coding model is something very new and had virtually no documentation and was in a great state of flux at the time we designed our little widget. Now it needs to be redone–essentially from the ground up.

It only showed up when some of the other teams started calling into our UI and problems showed up if you didn’t do things precisely the way it was intended to work. These other teams are partially blocked by this bug on my plate and it is my number 1 priority to get this fixed ASAP. No pressure there…

My boss says he starts getting into heart attack territory when we have an average of 10 bugs per developer. We currently have an average of something like eight and I have 16 on my plate. No pressure there…

So I was digging into the samples (which don’t work) on how do this thing when the PM stopped by to give my officemate and I some “encouragement”. In his heavy East German accent he said, “Yah! You should know that in just weeks Steve Ballmer is going to demo this to the world…” Now that is some pressure.

I think I need a caffeine IV drip.