An apology and an explanation

I've spent the past week wrangling with an annoying bug in the code. Turned out to be a simple mistake, but since the lighting code was all new I had to go over it with a fine-toothed comb until I figured out what was wrong. Fixing it was simple enough, but it took me a while. It didn't help that I had a particularly busy month.

As the days passed and it seemed like I would miss my deadline, I had to make a choice. Either release what I had, knowing it was buggy, or let the week pass. I had the post already done, and I could fix the demo in the meantime. I had already slipped into posting on Wednesdays while doing the lighting bit, and I didn't want to completely miss the week.

Really didn't want to be tardy

However, the philosophy of releasing for a deadline, not when it is working, is one of the things I dislike about the programming industry. Seeing as this is something I'm doing for myself, I want it to be done right and follow my own ideals.


One of these ideals is releasing with no known bugs. No program more complex than 'Hello World' is ever bug free, but it's one thing for your users to find bugs, and a very different thing for you to release a bug you know about into the wild. Releasing with the expectation of a patch later is the reason why so much stuff works as badly as it does.

The downside is that if I'm planning to make a release and just missing the demo, a bug that takes too long to fix (an amount of time fundamentally unpredictable) will throw my schedule off and leave me with nothing to post. I do have to apologize for that. I should work on building a buffer of some sort, although that's a bit difficult as what I usually do is write about what I'm doing at the time.

On the other hand, planning what I'll work on with more time can only help avoid these issues.

The bug is fixed, the demo is working, and I'm now working on the focus for the next part. I have scheduled the post with the explanation of the demo to go up at 9:00 GMT on Monday, so as to go back to my regular release day. In the meantime, the demo is up in Google Docs already.

As always, the folder is Framework Releases, and the project itself is Framework-0.0.8. I switched to zip files to make things simpler for everyone.

"I am NOT Tardy" Image by MidoriFlygon