Tomorrow, I’m 51. Tonight, I’m sitting on my work laptop, still working.

Here’s some details, which gives an idea of the pain of the evening. For about a week, I’ve been trying to figure out why the messaging component in this one service just stopped working. The logging shows that it can longer post messages, which is terrible. Unfortunately, it was swallowing the exception, which, you know, makes it a bit harder to figure out what was going on. I did some dark sorcery and got it to reveal its secrets: a dependent library was newer than another dependent library was expecting.

It’s called “DLL Hell” and it is a real place. It’s where I’m living right now, and for the next couple of hours. Somewhere along the lines, a dependent library needed one of its supporting libraries to move forward, because the version was old and a security risk. It was like a pressure valve, building up steam over time, until finally someone saw the warning lights and threw the switch to allow it to move before everything exploded.

Exploded for them, anyway. I allowed the rest of the libraries and packages to move forward to their latest stable version, which broke everything. Method signatures no longer match up. Entire portions of the code are on fire. Things don’t compile. The damn busted and instead of having a broken messaging component, the entire service is under water.

So, no writing tonight. Also, I took the weekend off. I might keep doing that. It’s hard to write when I’m recovering from the long week days. And then there’s days like today where it’s hard to do anything at all.

Tomorrow, I have an eye appointment. And then I probably need to work a bit late to make up for lost time and to try and get this stupid sprint to the finish line.

If there’s no blog post tomorrow night, it’s because I’m still under water.