karniv0re's Journal: The Waiting Game Is a Stupid Game

I've got this ColdFusion app that sucks in a bunch of data from a Teradata database, and joins it up with a bunch of data in an Oracle database, and then stores it in its own table. The problem with this is, I have to run a nightly batch job to suck it all in. I'm doing this in ColdFusion, so I've got a 5 minute timeout (default web timeout) that I need to stay under. Everything was fine until I got a complaint about a feature of the archive script not working. I think I fixed that, but now it's going way over 5 minutes, and I think this is because before, it was skipping a whole section. Now that I've got it hitting this section of code, it's running waayyyyy longer.

And it wasn't until late yesterday that I finally decided to do some log statements. See, in Java, I'd just step through the code with a debugger. But with ColdFusion (particularly in our environment) we just edit our code and hit a URL and the server runs it. No way to debug. Typically, it's not a big deal. Just through in some output statements and see where your trouble lies. But now I can't even get the damn thing to return to the browser. So logging has become a necessity.

So now I've got my log statements in there and I'm just waiting for the damn thing to timeout. The waiting game.

So while I'm waiting, I'm going to bitch about a coworker. He's one of the managers here, and I do not work for him. But that doesn't stop him from fucking things up for me, and everyone, really.

I used to think he was just a harmless kiss-ass who liked to suck up to his boss and his boss' boss, and his boss' boss' boss, ad infinitum. That would be annoying, but it's whatever. But now, it's become clear that he's out of control. He's amassed an army of pawns who don't necessarily know he's terrible and are willing to do whatever he asks. And it would be another thing if he actually knew what he was doing. But he doesn't. He's technologically stupid, and architecturally shortsighted.

The thing that set me off a couple weeks ago was when one of his people asked me for help getting the customer that is attached to a user ID. I told him that you just need to extend one of our common components and that it's done for you. Then I asked to see his code. It was alien. There was nothing resembling our company's coding standards to be found. And then I found out that this was already being used for demos to boss' boss' boss etc.

This is the kind of thing that I could ignore if I didn't know it would come back to me some day to be maintained or fixed, or whatever. And by that point, it'd be so entrenched that refactoring would be outlandish. And since I didn't get the Architect job here, I'm trying to keep an open mind about the new Architect. But so far, all I've seen is - ugh, let's just call him Brody, cause it starts with a B, and he's also kind of a bro-dude-buddy - Brody using him as his personal architect. And I don't think he's deep-dived into our systems yet. That bugs me. He need to know this stuff inside and out to be the architect, and so far, all he's talked about it how they did it at his last company and gives us this pie-in-the-sky answers about how we COULD do things. I'm not interested in COULD. I'm interested in what are we doing now, and what can we do tomorrow to show results. I dunno, he just seems lazy to me, and not the "I'm so good at my job I look lazy" way. I also found out he was friends with his boss, which is probably part of the reason for the hire. I'm still trying to keep an open mind, but I'm slowly starting to form an opinion and so far, it isn't terribly high.

And now, 20 minutes after I ran my script, it finally timed out. I'm trying to get the logs I wrote, which are huge. And the geniuses behind our logviewer thought it would be good to use infinite scrolling to display logs with no "download log file" option. So, this is gonna take another hour. Ffffuuuuckkkkk. Nobody thinks about utility around here. It's like, "Oooh, let's implement this fun cool looking feature" without thinking about how useful it will be. I just want the raw logs so I can open them in Vim and see what the hell my app is doing. Ugghhhhghghhgghghghgh!!fFFFUUCCCKKK.

I guess that about sums it up.