Struggling Through the Day
Today has been a challenge for me. I haven't had a really good day, but I have to admit, in the grand scheme of things, it hasn't been the worst either. It's been a day where I've been fighting my instincts to do "more" - a kind term for stepping on people's toes. More VM problems - I've just had it with VMs for web servers - I've asked for dedicated machines for the web servers (UAT and Production).
I've also run into a most 'unique' situation with chat. Seems we had a custom chat system created - based on IRC, but extended to allow for all the compliance issues that might arise in a trading shop. No surprise there.
No, the surprise is that we have no documentation on the authentication system at all. It "just works", but if it stopped working someday, there's not a scrap of documentation to say what it should be doing as a place to start to see what's going wrong.
This lack of design docs bothered me - I just wanted to be able to code it up so that my web app with alerts could chat them to the users. It's a simple thing, really. But you would not believe the kind of run-around I seemed to get.
Some folks just said "don't use it". Well... it's a little late for that - it's in production, not going away, and I need to chat to something. Saying it's horrible is a judgement call, but I still have to work with it. I just want to know what it's doing!
Several hours have passed and I've just asked over and over to talk to someone at the shop that built this. I just need to know what it's passing around and I can take it from there. It's not magic, it's code. But rather than try to guess looking at the code, I wanted a simple design doc - or even just a protocol explanation.
Hours later and nothing. I'm guessing this won't be over soon. I have no idea why.
It's just very draining. Very. I'm tired and I want to go home.