Personal Blogs

Today I downloaded the first TMA for the Topology course; the books haven't even been posted yet. Still, come late[-ish] February the thing [the TMA] and its associated PT3 will have to be with my tutor. It's getting serious again.

So, fin de siècle, I've been playing around with my solitaire thingee. I fear that in the near future the poor beast will become neglected. No...that's not right...what's the word that I want? Oh yes, broken, utterly broken.

I've built many a poor beast over the years, all have proved flaky, shoddy, ill-considered and, in-the-end, worthless. For once, this time, I've built something that has some legs [if only in my head]. I know this because I'm having to go out of my way to break the thing; usually this happens by default. On a simple opening.

[It also does some of the things that I meant it to do.]

I don't want to destroy it. But destroy it I shall if I hopelessly-hack-at-it during the few idle moments that I'll have between now and October. Version control is all very well—you can rewind the code. What you can never do is put yourself back into, "knowing what you [meant yourself to be] do[ing]". If you have no documentation, that is.

So I've made a decision: this weekend I'll collate all the pages (bits of paper), that I can scavenge from the scattering of the floors, into a specification, I'll re-do my to-do list, I'll write down my feature requests, I'll make a plan, I'll finish the tests, I'll make sure that the Javadoc makes sense. I'll do what I should have done.

So that, at moments of stress, when maths hurts and I seek the balm of code, I might, do something useful.

Won't, won't and won't.