Flashes of Panic

I don’t know when I crossed the line to where bug-fixing began to be the sort of thing I want to tell stories about. In the last week I’ve had several incidents where code has started to have its own stories.

Like the time I was sitting in a conference room where another developer was discussing a related-but-not-mine component of the larger project. By the time he got around to the bug in my project, which stemmed from code checked in by the team on the other end of the call… I had a fix on my screen.

Today, on the other hand. We have VM images which are supposed to be a clone of the production environment, made to work with VMWare. Naturally, I have to work around two or three problems to get this working (the VM can’t see the code repository, for example, so I can’t check out recent code) but I hack around it until it’s working.

But shouldn’t I test the fix before I check it in? In multiple browsers?

So this was how I found myself firing up Windows XP in Parallels Desktop, so I could use one virtual machine to test an application running in another virtual machine. I felt a little bit like I was juggling chainsaws.