There’s nothing quite like coming back to a development job after two or more weeks out. That feeling of looking at code for the first time and not being able to see the meaning of the lines.

Publicpay ActionResultway Avesay(Odelmay odelmay)
{
 isthay.OpulateRulepay(efray odelmay);

ActionResultway esultray = isthay.EdirectToActionray("Iewvay", odelmay);
eturnray esultray;

}

Three days later my brain has finally recognised that this should be:

public ActionResult Save(Model model)
{
   this.PopulateRule(ref model);

   ActionResult result = this.RedirectToAction("View", model);
   return result;

}

And I know there’s logic in there, but I just can’t focus to carry the thread through. It’s like reading a book, seeing and reading the words without being able to get the meaning from a sentence.

So in future, whenever I’m taking a break for longer than a week I will not leave large abstract tasks for myself when I come back. Maybe a couple of gimmie tasks to get up and running again.

You know what’s worse than getting a defect fix back in your queue?

Getting a defect fix back in your queue, for the second time, when you were very confident of the previous fixes (in fact even proud that you managed to crack that tough problem) and the only place that the problem is presenting is on QA’s side.

I never, ever, want to be the dev who seriously says ‘but it works on my machine’ but when I’ve tried from team mates machines, remote desktopped into QA boxes and I still can’t reproduce the problem it makes me want to pull my hair out.

My first instinct as a developer is to say “they’re doing something wrong” but the fact is that if QA say’s it’s slow for them, well then, it’s slow for them.

It doesn’t help that as a performance issue there’s a whole host of potential other issues which could also be impacting on all of this from computer hardware, anti-virus or other programs to network latency.

Oy Vey.

>edit – 2 weeks later<  
To paraphrase Homer Simpson; "JavaScript! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."
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