Wasted Development Time

Posted on:April 11 2012

I hate those situations in which you sit down for a few weeks and implement a highly complex algorithm you made up yourself for solving a specific problem. Finally, happy that you finished it and it does what it is supposed to do, you notice that it doesn't work in all cases you have thought of, and that all your work was senseless. But instead of deleting all the code and starting from scratch, you try to fix those few edge cases with evil, evil hacks, but instead of getting better, the problem gets even more bad.
That's what just happened to me. Argl. I guess I have to start over again. Sometimes, programming really sucks. :/

Comments:

Satisfy my curiosity: was it object oriented?

Nostaw

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2012-04-11 14:32:00

Yes, but it had nothing to do with that. Why?

niko

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2012-04-11 15:38:00

Any details about the problem?

Julien Koenen

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2012-04-11 20:45:00

hah that's what I love about programming, it can completely shatter your ego.

One moment you are thinking you are so smart for implementing this amazing new algorithm, the next you feel like an ass for wasting so much time on it.

Umar

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2012-04-12 09:13:00

Is it related to object edge detection, or something entirely different?

xaos

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2012-04-12 11:01:00

no, some work for a client, nothing very interesting. :)

niko

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2012-04-12 16:27:00

Programming is like that. The more it seems that we made an excellent program, the harder it is to correct the bug that we discovered later.

Enrique Gabriel

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2012-04-13 03:44:00

Tell me about it... I had to develop and implement an algorithm for analyzing a video-stream in realtime. Then I found out, that in one special case it won't work as expected and - even worse - crash the entire application. Client said, that it was okay, since this case would never happen (yeah, I hear you Murphy). Turned out, that under real conditions this "rare" case showed up 20-30 percent of the time.

Then the patching started... and continued...

KIENI

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2012-04-16 13:46:00