Code of Faith

Yesterday, Doug and I were tasked with being ambassadors for “The Organization”. So we loaded up in the Pathfinder and headed out. After navigating through the busy Phnom Penh traffic we set out on the main highway heading toward a remote village. Along the way one of the many one lane bridges was under repair so we sat waiting to cross the bridge for about 20 minutes. We knew that we were also going to need to take a ferry to get to this village so we stopped for lunch before we proceeded.

When we got to the ferry station we found 2 fishing boats with a wood plank deck built on top. There was room for mopeds on one end, people on the other and 1 truck or van in the middle. Our truck covered the entire width of the ferry. After a leisurely crossing, we unloaded and within a few minutes we found our way to a fork in the road. Read More

Less than 24 hours from now I’ll board a plane heading to LAX. From there it’s on to Hong Kong. We’ve got an 8 hour layover there, and we’re hoping we can get out of the airport to do a little sight-seeing. Then it’s back to catch a flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

About 10:30pm tonight I decided to go get the last minute supplies I needed from Wal-Mart. Bad idea. Apparently tonight was the night that Wal-Mart sent all their cashiers home early and everyone was doing their monthly grocery shopping. I stood in line for over 20 minutes and didn’t even move. I finally just ditched my cart and came home. I was too tired to stand there for another 30 minutes.

The custom CMS package is now displaying text to the browser. I got the text editor working so now updates to said pages can be made easily. But at the same time, the more I work on this, I realize there are more and more components that pop up that need to be coded. There are going to be a lot of late nights trying to get this functioning before I leave for Cambodia in 19 days. That self-imposed deadline is looming large in front of me.

But despite all the stress of feature creep and deadlines, I did have some victories. I have spent the last few weeks trying to develop a module that will allow the end user to reorder pages in their menu structure. I also want the module to allow users to move pages into a hierarchy if they want. And for several weeks, I would write equations and draw diagrams to no avail. The solutions functioned but were incomplete. That was until yesterday. I was taking a break and thinking about the problem. It was almost as if the heavens opened and the answer came forth. It was a simpler solution, yet worked in all situations.

It is moments like that which make me remember why I love programming. The struggles, the puzzles, the late nights trying to debug code are all worth it. And yes even the moments where I realize my complete incompetence. Many times after hours of struggling with something, the solution presents itself. Most times it was staring me in the face the whole time. Yet the next time, I do not make the same mistake or I diagnosis the problem in minutes as opposed to hours.