City Coding - A Work Day Bookended With Rage - Kalgar

Tiger rawr asked me to write him a post about what it's like to be a coder in the city, with the intent of doing a guest post of this newfangled blog thingamajig. And so, without any further ado, words follow about this very topic - Kalgar.

I work as a programmer at a small company in the glorious city of Sydney know as The Project Factory. In fact, I was Tiger's replacement at this establishment, and as such I suppose I indirectly enabled hm to return to Bathurst. *shrug*. My role at said company is pretty much to write code. Lots and lots of code, with the intent of creating iPhone applications. At least, that's what they tell me, though I have seen no reason to believe otherwise. Yet.

A typical day begins with me waking up. This is quite an important part of the day, and usually immediately followed by my regret of having played video games so late the night before. This is soon forgotten when I shower, get my stuff together, and head off to the bane of every commuter's existence - the train.

CityRail is the culprit of my twice (and occasionally thrice) daily torture session. Torture via travel on a horrendous train, dealing with stupid hateful people. It makes me want to set everything I ever knew on fire.

For starters, there are the occasions when I sit on the train, minding my own business, playing my PSP, when someone sits next to me. I do not have a problem with this principle - heck, it's what public transport is for. What I DO resent is the fact that every single one of the will, without fail, sit on my jacket. While I am wearing it. They literally sit on the part of my jacket that is on the bench. This prevents me from moving. At all. For the rest of the trip. Most of them tend to give me an angry glare when I shift and pull the jacket out from under them. What the hell? They have eyes (and for the most part, their eyes work better than mine), they should bloody use them and give me a moment to move! Sheesh!

Also, I completely fail to understand how CityRail can fail so very much. they handed me a brochure the other week, which was essentially a "look how good we are! Look at all the improvements we are making for you, the customer!" I gave it a cursory glance for the lulz, and got quite a few out of it. For starters, they are aspiring to 92% reliability. This means that they AIM to have 92% of their trains actually show up. Not necessarily on time (they have a separate statistic for that), just showing up at all. One look at Sydney Ferries reveals 100% reliability, and 99.8% on time. And that is a form of transport which may cancel a trip if the water is too rough.

Boats. Much More Hardcore Than Trains.

When I eventually arrive in the city, I get my morning EasyWay tea (Green Apple flavoured black tea with tapioca pearls...mmmmmmmm) and head up to the office. It's about a 5 minute walk up a somewhat gentle hill. Of course, many other people make the same walk. Except that many of these people are smokers. And are smoking while they walk up a hill. Leaving their smoke to blow behind them. Directly into my face. I don't have a problem with people smoking - they are free to commit a slow, painful suicide if they so wish. I do not smoke. I would rather be able to breathe, thank you very much. So I would appreciate it if you didn't blow that smoke directly into my face. If you are going to smoke, then there's no reason for you to be walking up the hill while you do so! What, you can't afford 5 minutes to have a smoke without being late for work? Well there are multiple solutions to that. No I won't spell them out for you, I shouldn't have to.

I get to work, get into the office, and then look at whatever has been sent to my email. Occasionally it's a change request, more often it's asking for a device to be added to the provisioning for testing of an app, or some such. No big deal. I spend most of the day writing, testing and debugging code for iPhone apps. Occasionally there is some programming for Ruby on Rails servers in there, but since we recently hired a programmer who specialises in Rails, my workload in that regard has been reduced (although he is going to start to teach me how to do that stuff, which will be awesome.)

Once I finished work at 4:30 (I start at 8:30) I walk down the hill, head to the train station, and if I'm lucky, get on a train. If I'm unlucky, I wait. And wait, and wait. Like the other day. A customer "threatened self-harm" (their words, not mine) at Petersham. This caused 30 minute delays for every train line on the network, bar one. Looking at the map, Petersham station only connects on a single line. Three other lines go past there, which is fine, those ones would also get delayed if someone was on the tracks.

That is a total of four lines, at most, which should experience problems as a result. There are nine lines (discounting the sprint lines, peak our only lines, and intercity.) From this event, only one line did not have delays. Eight lines - 4 of which have no connection with Petersham, were delayed.

What?!?

When I get home, I tend to play a lot of video games. Lately it's been Dragon Age, so that I can play Dragon Age II soon.

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So guys, that was Kalgar's guest post for me. You should check out his blog! It is cool and the cool kids all enjoy it!