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Yesterday just may have been the most unproductive day I’ve had at IRC. We’re nearing the end of a relatively tough-to-meet deadline (which results in a rather large deployment), and I got nothing accomplished. In fact, I’ve managed to go backwards.

The day before, an incredibly productive day, made me anxious to finish up; however, I ran into my first issue almost immediately. No problem, I can fix anything, right? Two hours later, I was still struggling with the same problem. Going against my better judgment, I moved on to a few of the bugs that I knew I could fix quickly. You know, supporting the “if you step away from it for a while…” mentality. It didn’t help matters, because I spent the rest of the morning on a new, but equally irritating and apparently not as easy to fix as I had thought, bug. The same one I had planned on gaining the quick-win off of.

Lunch rolled around, and I couldn’t ignore the aggravation. All I thought about were those two seemingly simple bugs, and what on earth would lead me to their demise. My attempts to fix the second bug led to not only the second bug not being fixed, but resulted in two more bugs from code that was previously working fine.

To make a very long and drab story short(er), I left the day with three new bugs, in addition to my existing list of fixes. Legacy code is an evil beast, and can be very difficult to maintain. Especially when dealing with .NET stuff like this (access a <span> from the server-side):

Dim detailsSpan As System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl = e.Item.FindControl("courseDetails")

Yuck. Have you ever felt like you’re worthless for an entire day, and you’ve caused more work for yourself just by being there? Hopefully today goes a lot smoother.