What Animal Is Joe Eating?

Are burritos essential to coding?

Posted: 12/11/2006

I spent most of my Sunday doing work. Not fun work, but work work— that is, for my job. I’ve got about three weeks of work to cram into one calendar week. After this coming Friday, I’m off until the new year.

So I spent about twelve hours sitting at my bar with my laptop writing code. And it wasn’t even code I wanted to write— it was something I had to re-write. A while back, I wrote a program to automatically bounce information off of a government website that didn't allow batch checking. That is, my company is required to validate a bunch of information with the government via website, but the website is only designed to accept a single line at a time— and I needed to be able to check about 10,000 line items. So, the easiest and quickest way to do this was to write a custom program that automatically sends each of the 10,000 items one after the other, without having a user enter each line item.

But then, without warning, the government completely changed their format for checking the information. Not a simple redesign, which the program could handle, but a ground-up re-formatting, meaning a complete re-write. Oy.

Mary had mercy though and made burritos— that made me happy. And where else could I be productive while sitting at a bar all day on a weekend?

What Animal Is Joe Eating?

Updated 12/6/06

Are burritos essential to coding?