TGIF

It is downright wrong for a week to feel like it has been “crazy long” when in point of fact, it was technically a “short” week.

I feel as though this has been one of those 9-straight-day marathons, instead of a four-day (mostly) normal work week.

But on the bright side, the kittens probably kept a couple of my coworkers and/or business partners from being on the receiving end of particularly vitriolic emails.

Plus I now have a certain body of evidence indicating that it is completely impossible for me to maintain Pissy Momentum if I have to stop in the middle of it to pluck a kitten off the keyboard.

Or if the kitten sits next to the keyboard peering earnestly into my face and going, “Mew! Mew! Mew! Meow! Mew? Mrrow? Mew! Mew! Mew!”

Or if the kitten shifts on my lap and looks up at me through one half-opened eye like, Dude. You’re harshin’ my mellow right now. Settle down, bro, you make a lousy pillow when you get all TENSE like that!

“DEAR FATHEAD, I SERIOUSLY DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION IS BUT IF YOU DON’T GET A GRIP IN THE NEXT TWO SEC…awww…you’re so cuuuuuuuuute…!”

(We pretty much only have pictures of them sleeping. Because when they’re not sleeping, they’re little blurs.)

In related news, we’re almost positive we finally have their names. The slightly goofy-looking, wide-eyed, curious-but-cautious, EXTREMELY-vocal-when-feeling-left-out-of-the-party gray girl (on the top) is apparently Ms. Samantha Schilling, Private Eye.

And her equally vocal-when-she-wants-something, fluffier, bolder, more-Hallmark-greeting-card sister is Fleur Fatale (whether or not there is a Kitten Mystérieux at the end of this remains to be seen) (OH, AND, you have to say ‘kitten’ like this: kee-tohn)

Anyway – yeah. Long week, for a short one. Today was the final QA sign-off for the June deploy cycle. It was, as always, a day of rushing around frantically with last second Things that we all start testily asking each other, how did you not see THAT while we were still in DEV or SIT?

If there is any point in the whole ‘development life cycle’ at which teams will start hitting each other with heavy objects, it would be this day. The day when the fate of the stuff you’ve been sweating bullets over for the last however-many weeks is in the hands of the QA team. When that guy’s screw up causes your solution to fail. When your assigned QA person is being a knucklehead.

Look, I KNOW the source has 90,000,000 rows in it and our QA table only has 100,000…THIS IS NOT A DEFECT, IT IS A NECESSITY. If we tried to simulate four days of business as usual in a six hour period using a 90,000,000 row load, IT WOULD NOT WORK. The laws of physics are against us.

When you’re being a knucklehead.

Did I stutter?! I know you don’t wanna deal with “the hassle” here, but if you’re not going to get me a representative cross-section of these various use-cases for me to test, I CAN’T PASS THIS ITEM. I’m not SAYING I want ALL 90,000,000 rows, just at least, say, 10 from each of these 40 use-cases. STOP BEING RANDOM WITH THE ROWS YOU PULL IN.

For bonus points, we’re having some pretty ugly issues in production around one of our key nightly export jobs. There’s this one job that keeps failing, this one job that our final answer neeeeeeeeds in order to be correct, and it has to run right before that final extract has to run, and when it fails, it brings us to a hard stop.

And it has been failing night after night after night.

We’re all getting pretty stressed out over it. I’ve been working on it almost exclusively for almost three weeks, and it’s proving to be one of those deals where I fix one thing, only to discover that while that one thing was, you know, a thing and all…it wasn’t the last thing.

Oh no. There’s more.

But, we’re safely past it tonight. And now it is the weekend, when fewer people really care if things fail and take a while to get back on-track again.

We got our QA sign off this afternoon, we got everything fixed that we wanted to get fixed, the code is frozen until our deploy at the end of next week.

{Yawn!} {Stretch!}

Long week. Glad it’s over.

I wonder what next week will be like…