The Eraser

Microsoft Visual Studio and Windows Vista

2007-07-19T01:42:00.001-07:00

I wonder if the Visual Studio developers tried using Windows Vista or for that matter, whether the Vista development team tried using Visual Studio (I know… I know…). I mean, let's ignore the special patch required to run Visual Studio 2005 on Vista but the UAC warning that pops up every time you launch Visual Studio (since it requires administrator privileges) is so annoying. In fact, it took me about five minutes before I just completely gave up and disabled UAC for good.

Eraser

2007-07-18T11:44:00.001-07:00

Why Eraser? A few of my friends gave me this nickname since they claim I'm quite good at eliminating software and system bugs. Usually, when there is a major crisis at the company or an unlocatable bug, i get called and help the developers find the bug.
It's not my job. I'm actually the system/software architect.
However, I do think that it's part of my duty. Actually, I think it's a neglected duty that a lot of R&D leaders rather forget.
Inexperienced (and some of the experienced) team leaders get overzealous in their job. As soon as they become team leaders they tend to direct their attention into exactly two areas:

Gantt creation and editing,
Design stuff (which is cool...).

Bug finding and helping their team memebers solve the bugs seems to them as a boring, tedious job that the programmers should do on their own.
Myself, I found quite the oposite. I find that going over code and helping programmers (young and experienced) to find their bugs will help me understand the software and system better. Most of the bugs I can locate quite fast, mostly since I've seen most of it before and the developers will appriciate the help. Developers will also show more respect and tend to listen to someone who actually sat and sweated the code with them.

And I sat and sweated with most of them...

Eraser.

The Grand Opening

2007-07-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

Just spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what's the best post to start this blog up. After wasting all of that time, decided just to let you know what's up.
I'm working in an Internet gaming company. Our games are real time with lots of concurrent players playing against each other (and alone). I thought I'll share some of my stories and experience of trying to develop new features for the games, maintain the legacy system and so on.

Hope you'll enjoy,

The Eraser.