I finally finished the logging for the build! It wasn’t easy, and I kept running into one challenge after another, but ultimately I was able to finish it.

QA and I set a goal of Thursday, by which I was to try and finish the logging for the build, so that we would be able to do a test run on Friday, and have it all good by the weekend. Chip was out this week, so we also decided that we would surprise him with the whole thing done when he got back. With this in mind, I sat down on Monday, trying to get at least the morning segment of the build done by the end of the day.

The morning segment was fairly straightforward, all I had to do was make sure all the steps for two of the daily collections had been run. The early afternoon steps were slightly more problematic, as I had to dig into huge blocks of code to find out exactly which functions were being run for which menu call, and then had to time those functions and log their occurrences to HipChat. Though this initially seemed to be a tedious task, I eventually figured out that this was teaching me how to find certain segments and be able to link it to all the functions that it calls/are calling it, which can be really useful for when the code crashes (which it occasionally did while I was trying to compile my changes. I then progressed to the late afternoon build, which is the most complex segment of the build, and has multiple concurrent processes, which all need to be tracked, as they are interdependent. This was pretty challenging, as some of these processes also collided with processes being run at other times of the day, but with different inputs. This led to a few complications, but as previously mentioned, once I figured out which methods depended on variable inputs and how they functioned with the inputs, I was able to connect them to HipChat with relative ease. All it then took was finishing the job, which just required more of the same thing, and making sure that the logs didn’t collide and the build didn’t crash.

That’s all for this week, I’m not really sure what I’m going to be working on this coming week, but if the last few weeks are any indication of it, then I’m sure it’s going to be challenging as well as informative! Keep following to find out what I end up doing with my upcoming week!