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tool police
Friday, April 29 2016
Most days I have just one meeting, and it's with the rest of the IT team. Today, though, I had three. The second was the Friday all-hands meeting. I'd phoned in, as had Chris (of Chris & Kirsty, the photogenic vegans), since he too now works for The Organization. "How's the weather on the other side of the reservoir?" he asked. As a crow flies, we were only 6.3 miles apart, but both of us were attending a meeting in West Hollywood. I didn't have anything to contribute to the meeting, so I put my phone on mute and went around the yard cleaning up any dogshit I could find, burying it in a trench in the main garden patch. The third meeting was also by phone, and again I could just have it on mute while I puttered around.
After the meetings were done, I took a fifty milligram dose of Vyvanse and waded into the email list code, hoping to track down the source of the language issues. If you're a coder and enjoy your work, there are few experiences as thrilling as debugging under the influence of Vyvanse (or, really, any amphetamine derivative). The code I was looking at was a wild Byzantine tangle involving three different servers and two APIs. By now I'd isolated the problem to the final server in the chain, but I ran into trouble because a record being added to a table was referencing a record in another table that did not exist. So I reached out to Meerkat on Google hangouts to ask about it. It soon turned out that an import of a table whose data I'd specifically asked for had slightly failed because of a handmade record I'd placed in that table before I'd had the real data. "Didn't you see an error when you imported?" Meerkat asked impatiently. "I don't remember," I replied. "What did you use to do the import?" he asked. Oh brother, I thought, here we go again! During the week I'd worked in the makeshift office in West Hollywood, I'd had to hide my use of Tableform, the database visualizer and all-around editor I'd built myself beginning in 2006. Meerkat had taken one glimpse at it and gruffly asked why it was I wasn't using phpMyAdmin (which is the tool most LAMP-stack web developers use for this). At the time there hadn't been time to explain the history of Tableform, that I'd built it before I was ever aware of phpMyAdmin, and that there are many things Tableform can do that phpMyAdmin could not. I'd decided to kick that can down the road and make use of Tableform on the sly. But this evening, Meerkat had just busted me using the evidence at hand. But the truth of the matter was that I'd actually done the import using mysql at the command line, since Tableform's import, working though a web upload, is clunky and indirect (as is phpMyAdmin's). But saying that didn't make the situation any better. In the tone (as best as could be surmised in a text-based chat) of someone addressing a petulant child, Meerkat said that this was why he wanted us all using phpMyAdmin, that it gives a big error screen and the entire transaction fails whenever even one record cannot be inserted (that's probably another reason I don't like it). In a conciliatory tone (as best as could be expressed in a text-based chat), I said that this sounded like a useful feature, but then I went on to say why I use my tool: that it predates phpMyAdmin and that it does a lot more than phpMyAdmin, particularly when viewing data spanning multiple tables across one or more relationship. I went on to mention how it provided for the production of database maps, one of which has proved helpful in working on the ongoing task. At this, Meerkat became a little conciliatory too, saying that I was free to use my tool for things such as that and that he'd actually like for me to share my database maps with the rest of the IT team. But he was insistent that I use phpMyAdmin for imports. To make him happy, I said that I would. But that just means I'll have to be more careful with my imports in the future, because using phpMyAdmin for importing a .sql file is, for me, a little like using a limousine to deliver newspapers on a boyhood paper route. But at least the work week ended on a good note, with me uploading a database map of The Organization's most complicated database to IT's folder on Google Drive.
Soon thereafter, I watched an episode of Better Call Saul with Gretchen, followed by the first episode of the new sixth season of Game of Thrones all by myself. It was the one featuring Melisandre's stunning reveal, which happened to unexpectedly that I had to back up and watch it again. By this point I was definitely drinking; there's no other easy way down from a 50 milligram dose of Vyvanse. It kept me up until 3:00am, and there was also a good bit of marijuana smoked.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160429 feedback
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