Slow & Steady

I have been spending what can only be described as an ‘unnatural’ amount of time at work for the last few months. It seems like every hour I put in at the office somehow begs another until finally I am either exhausted or asleep.

I have a pair of orange fuzzy pillows and a course green blanket rolled up into a neat little pile under what I describe as the ‘left causeway’ of my desk. This is that into which I collapse after 16 or so hours pumping data, matching patterns and modularizing the last 3 years of the company’s code; getting ready for a move, a change of pace, face and base.

A technology shift is difficult for any company, I am sure. I remember spending grueling hours translating ColdFusion into COM ready VBS for TRW and imagine that this is something most companies with an IT arm or Internet product must eventually ‘come to the bridge’ about. I wonder, though, what the challenges will be with the current shift – the one I am a part of just now – the one I treat with more attention and respect than my closest single human connections. I wonder if it will be a taxing effort, packed with frustration and angry debate, or if it will go as planned – a bit of effort up front and a lot of creativity later.

Worst, though, I suppose, is that I honestly wonder if it is worth it.

That is not to undermine its importance to the company, nor to weigh the value of its completion against the tireless effort I will most certainly entertain in the process; rather to wonder, for a moment, where this technology shift will truly take us.

We are moving from a ‘Legacy’ or ‘Classic’ (read: more than 3 years old) ASP architecture to the newer, more powerful ASP.NET framework. On paper, this change looks like a frigging goldmine. ASP.NET presents a far greater initial toolset and much ‘higher level’ programmatic structure than its now defaced older brother, and is built in such a way that a transition from ASP Classic should be a breeze providing that the previous structure was written in a manner befitting of the change. A manner, perhaps, at least a little bit scalable, with maybe a tiny bit of attention paid to structure and modularity.

Providing that. Providing that. Who the hell was supposed to provide that anyway? Whomever it was, he was never assigned to the code I am spending my days and nights swimming in.

‘Frustration’ does a great injustice to word use everywhere when applied to what I spiral into every day from 8am to 8pm, often floundering until well after that. The problem is that the company got to where it is on this code. This code is the great oaken ships’ hull that has hauled pirates, prisoners and slave chicks all over the goddamned place for too many years to count. Sure it takes a beating and needs to be patched here and there. Sure more than half of the planks have been replaced and more than one ship’s officer has been sucked out of the damned thing when it popped under the sea pressure – but it is what has gotten the company to where it is today and is to be treated with respect. It is exceedingly hard, though, to respect that which you spend your days into the double digits fixing for weeks on end. Now we want to pack the beast up and move her to bigger, better seas.

This means she’ll need a new hull – a new crew. Toss the sails and get a nice fat diesel engine and a freaky German guy straight out of ‘Das Boot’ to man her. Rebuild the whole damnable thing.

So for now it is packing up. Getting the old planks off of the existing hull, finding the rot and the infestation and repairing what we can as we pack things away into COM objects to be used with the new framework. For now it is out with the old and in with the new. My concern lays mostly with the fact that the new will only be the new for so long – and we are taking quite a big step into it.

You want to know the most interesting part of this whole ordeal, to me, though? I love it. I fucking love it. The hours, the frustration, the work, the effort – it is such an important challenge. The next few months will be huge steps for both me and the company I will drag along, bleeding and sweating and cursing every step, into tomorrow.