18 August 2015

Solving the Puzzle

Sometimes a puzzle presents itself to you. Sometimes you’re aware of the puzzle, of it’s nature, and sometimes you just have this little… thing, this irritating little itch that you can’t seem to scratch.

Solving the puzzle can be straightforward.  The answer comes to you in a moment, in a flash of brilliance–or common sense–and then you move on.  But then there are those puzzles that take longer.  Hours.  Days.  Weeks.  Months.  Even years.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I solved one of those puzzles.  It was a puzzle I’d been working on for years, one that I was only casually aware of, but it was really digging at my (crazed)sanity.

This particular puzzle was one whose nature was in programming.

“I’m not a programmer.  This is gonna suck.”

I won’t get into the details; hell, that would bore the crap out of me.  And I’m the one that’s excited about it.

With programming puzzles, you’re almost never sure if it’s truly complete.  With a real puzzle, you’re told straight out of the box that there’s 250 pieces and it’s 15″ x 15″.  With programming, it might be five pieces, and be 50′ x 50′.  Or it could be 50,000 pieces, but only be a few inches wide and a few feet long… it’s just impossible to know.  And when you get to a point where you think, “gosh, I think it’s done,” you realize there’s a whole bunch more pieces that suddenly showed up.

And the other thing is, sometimes there are pieces of the puzzle that you don’t even realize are pieces.  You hold onto this little bit of information, because you know it’s important, but it just doesn’t seem to have correlation… until all of a sudden, you go, “holy crap, this thing here hooks onto this other thing…”

Yep.  It’s like that.


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Posted August 18, 2015 by Slaughter in category "Code", "Living With Linux", "PHP", "Rant", "Software Development