Hey, could you build...

That part where people ask if you could build a thing is never ending. The wife asked me about building something this morning. I couldn't run away as I was in the shower. 

Seems that Big Convention hired a company to build something that seems fairly simple, deadline of June 30, and BC hasn't seen the product yet. 

The sad part is... Yeah, I think I could build it, as could most everyone on here. A website that lets random folks sign in and fill out an incident report, storing the data in a db, and then lets others record all the follow up, plus create some progress reports, as well as daily and weekly reports. 

So yeah, I've already designed it, and redesigned it 5 times on the way to work, as I keep realizing new functions for it. 

Life as a coder.

I am not always smart

Witness me! I am an example of what not to do. 

Yesterday I was the pretty one! Like, so so pretty!

I spent several hours yesterday trying to figure out why I was making changes to files, and if I ran the file on its own it worked, but when I ran the bat file, it ignored all my changes. 

A coworker watched me make changes, and also couldn't understand why it was doing what it was doing. 

Today, I am less pretty. I discovered I was editing the files in the src folder, but the bat file runs the files in the main folder. 

Why there are duplicate files in this program I don't have an answer for. I didn't write it... But it is based on something I did write. So, it is complex.

They made changes

They asked me about progress on a program I started last Sept, and last touched in Dec. I was totally clueless at that point as it is pulling data out of Jira, and then running a UCC ESLOC comparison between the current and last pull request in bitbucket, take that value and insert it into customfield_24954.

And if you read all that I bet you are just as clueless about it as I was 8 months ago... And still am. 

The code I wrote that was kinda working... They changed how the api works, so now I got nothing. And I don't know what else is broken as it doesn't get past step 1.

In other words, it is a typical day in the life of a coder

Hired for our tech skills

 Mile long path to a folder. 

Cut & paste it into email... 

And because the very last folder has a space between the words, rather than a _, which is what the 10 other folders have, it fails to work, and I have to manually edit the link.

And we were all hired for our tech skills.

Trying to anticipate the end-user

 Trying to anticipate an end-user's needs. 

Do they want to keep old data or not? 

They want to keep the old file, but do they want to keep all of the old tabs, or can I delete everything other than Template, Cover Page, and the ones being updated?

I could make it so it takes a second argument (delete). If it is not there keep them, and if it is 'delete' then delete them. 

Sure I could just ask them, but where is the fun in that?

What are you doing today?

::: Scrum/dept meeting :::

Them: So what are you doing today? 

Me: Mostly screaming at my code. Just one word, over and over. And the word is "Why?". 

Sometimes the reason is me. 

Ok, most of the time.

31 character limit

Making something for work, a nice simple situation of reading all xlsx files in a folder and moving the data to a tab in a single xlsx file. Easy peesy. 

30 mins later I run it the first time. It ran, but was giving me "Excel found errors, but can recover the data". Data all looked good, except every tab after the first was named "Recovered #". 

2hrs of work, with lots of long walks, and off the clock research, later, I discovered that the issue is the file names that I am trying to use for the tab names are longer than 31 characters, and the first 31 characters are the same.  OK, the first 39 characters are the same, and then there are 10 more at the end that match. These file names are insanely long. 

So I set up a simple replace to remove everything that is duplicate data in the names, and it all works! The issue was in excel, not my code. I went so far as to try writing the data to a csv, and then to the final excel file to see if there was some weird characters or formatting setting it off, before I wondered if there is a limit to the size of an Excel sheet name.