As a programmer, I have had the joy of seeing a lot of my code ship with various projects in my career. One thing that I have found is, no matter how much I have tested, no matter how solid I feel about the code, there is always that moment of anxiety right before it ships. Its a natural feeling as a programmer to have these. You constantly strive for perfection but in the back of your mind you know that you’re a human who makes mistakes.
There are 3 basic rules to software programming. Most people don’t know them. Or if they do, they probably don’t know how to properly articulate them. So I’m going to spell out the 3 rules for you. This was talked about a lot at my last job early on when dealing with problems and support issues. Just about everything came back to one of these 3 rules, and unfortunately, rule 3 was more popular than even we believed.
Do you ever get to a point where you know that you are about to go on wicked run, but aren’t sure where it is you are going to go?
I’m at that point. The last time this happened I programmed for 16 of 24 hours and came up with a pop3 proxy that could check for spam, viruses, apply certain actions based on the results and do various account verification and logging. This was just a proof of concept all written in PHP.