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June 16, 2006
First Week on the job
This is fairly geek heavy, I'm afraid...
The good: everyone I've interacted with is sharp, passionate, and basically friendly.
The bad: God C++ is ugly. And cooperative multitasking in a single OS thread using coroutines is making my brain hurt. Most of the mental baggage of real threads, none of the hardware parallelism. It does explain why Half-Life 2 ran like shit on my dual-processor PIII SMP machine.
The Not-as-bad-as-I-thought: Seems that with some strategic additions (cygwin, PuTTY [ssh tunnels - don't leave home without 'em], Gaim, WindowBlinds, AppRocket [a pale shadow of Quicksilver], Reflex Vision, ...) Windows isn't completely intolerable. I suspect that the dual-core AMD with a top of the line graphics card and 30" flat screen have softened me up a bit.
The Not-as-good-as-I-thought: Visual Studio .Net 2003. The Microsoft dev tools are touted as the bees knees, and it's possible that they've made dramatic progress in the last version or so (I'm not sure why we're on 2003), but the complete and total lack of refactoring tools is astounding. The editor is ok, but no emacs, and the debugger is only adequate - their fix-and-continue feature has yet to work for me, always complaining that it couldn't fix anything, and couldn't even stop debugging to rebuild automatically.
The Jury-is-still-out: the commute has been ok so far, but it definitely has the potential to be the deal breaker. I made the 6:20 boat every night, or would have had some drunken ass-wipe not shut down the ferries for a few hours on Tuesday. Fortunately Ed and Holly were happy to have an impromptu dinner guest, so the evening actually worked out ok.
The Jury-is-still-out #2: Perforce - it's definitely fast, and change-sets are nice, but it's behavior is sometimes strange. I think I attribute most of my issues so far to Windows inability (refusal?) to over-write a file that's open by the IDE (debugger, specifically), but when I tell the client to sync and it can't update files, it should complain really loudly...
Oh, and I discovered that last year legislation was introduced (House Bill 1176, PDF link, sorry) into the WA House of Representatives that would legalize lane-sharing during times of traffic congestion. I wrote my representatives to encourage them to support it's passage. None of the other riders on the ferry seem to have heard about it either - so I'm informing them.
Posted by dberger at June 16, 2006 7:36 PM