Thursday, June 25, 2009

Coding Nirvana

I can't remember the last time I really got to sit down and just write some code, but yesterday I finally got a chance to do just that.  

I was originally supposed to have two summer students, but one of them did not show up for personal reasons.  I was disappointed, but these things happen.

I had planned for him to do some coding for me -- implementing a timing class in the chemistry code that I had wanted to implement but hadn't yet had the time.  But I found a little time yesterday to do that coding myself.

It felt really good to just sit there and write code.  I had already planned out the class somewhat, so that my student would have a clear project to do, which definitely helped.  So I didn't have too much thinking to do in some ways.

In other ways, I had a lot of thinking to do.  I had to figure out how best to implement it, and what types of accessor methods were needed.  I had to figure out just how to enumerate the different timers, and how to determine how many timers there were.  

I still haven't resolved everything, but it just felt good to exercise that creativity again.

2 comments:

PhizzleDizzle said...

hooray for coding! do you not hardly do that anymore? what do you do then? (i don't mean that in a snarky way at all, i am just curious).

Rebecca said...

Sadly, I hardly do any coding anymore. Too much of my time is spent on administrativa, such as making far too many powerpoint slides. Supervising the software infrastructure consists mostly of answering people's tickets and making my colleagues install software or else installing it myself.

On one of my research projects, I'm just running other people's software to solve mixed-integer linear programs. Only two of my projects involve code development, one of which is implementing some I/O crap which I don't count as particularly original or creative.

The other one, I just haven't had any time to do it and was planning to have my student do it. I did all the boring planning not-coding stuff ahead of time, and now since he didn't come I get to do the actual coding too.