Coding like your Life depended on it
This morning has been a very hectic morning. Some new instruments were traded and they weren't feeding properly into one of my systems so while I was trying to handle the production problem of halting the trades and manually amending positions, I was also trying to find the place in the code where I could augment the search symbology so that the instruments would feed. That, on top of trying to make an app that I didn't write a little more visually obvious that one of the instruments you have up you are not permissioned for from the exchanges. I got the guts of the fee-liable blocking done, but the app wasn't being a visually clear as the project manager wanted.
What a morning, indeed.
The second app had to wait as I feverishly tried to get things in production straightened out. Trades were backing up, things weren't looking good. Lots of stress if I have to restart the server... not fun. Amazingly, when the trades were pulled from the retry list and the positions manually updated, and the trade feed restarted, things started to work. This was major lucky break. With this, I had time to work on the solution. It took me another half hour to code the solution, test it in the development environment and then get it ready to deploy, but I had breathing room. The fix is a simple fall-back one - if the original symbology isn't found, try this other kind and see if it's there. It works cleanly without breaking anything else and it just plain works.
Once that was done I could focus my attention to the app with the visual issue. I'm not a big fan of Win32/MFC GUIs, and certainly when I didn't write them in the first place. Comments in this app date it to 1998 - that's almost a decade old, and the code shows it. There are a few comments, but not many. Trying to get things figured out is a process of tracing the logic through different libraries, different directories, it's a mess. But in the end I was able to get what I think the users will find reasonable. We'll have to see.
Most importantly, I'm out of the woods and things have calmed down. That's a major relief.