Last day in the office
August 24th, 2007 by Erik Benerdal
Today was my last day in the office . I took the next week off because, as a master of procrastination, I need a few days to get everything packed and ready.
The crew wrote me a card and gave me cake. It’s something we usually do for people’s birthdays but I still appreciated the gesture. Who doesn’t like cake and attention?
Most of my last day was wasted worrying about a really nasty crash bug. Meide took upon himself to track down the bug, but it was a tricky bug to find. It would only crash when we compiled in Release. Any programmer should know that you can compile in Debug and in Release. If you compile in Debug, Visual studio will pad your code with debug markers. It makes the game/app run slower, but in case of a crash we get detailed information where and why it occured. The release has no such markers, so our crash didn’t leave us with any information other than “something’s wrong”.
After a couple of hours Meide gave up. He went as far as to put a log inbetween every line of the suspected code. It’s like a poor man’s debug. He double checked everything but it kept crashing.
At around 7pm we figured out one of the DLL’s had changed and required to be swapped out. Finally! No crash! ..until about 20 seconds later in the game. Hmm. This wasn’t the same crash so I could run it in Debug mode and I got the crash info. At 8 o’clock I could resume on the work I was supposed to be doing. Since it was my last day I couldn’t leave any loose ends so I had to wrap up all my own code.
At around 9pm the programming team left the office, not sure whether to be happy or not. It’s a weird feeling about these types of bugs. The harder a bug is to find, the stupider it is. Even after you fix them you still feel bad for all the time you wasted on something really stupid.