One of the most annoying things about being a programmer in a “periodic” environment is that sometimes you’ve made an error in a program and by the time it becomes a problem you can’t even remember why you did it that way anymore, let alone if you were in fact the one to do it in the first place. Today we ran up against a problem wherein people were unable to add a fee option for the summer. Turns out the program had a bug in calculating the timeframe in which this option could be added. The bug was placed there by me in August. After Summer in other words. Actually the section of code it’s in is in two places, one for summer and one for fall & spring. The fall & spring code worked fine and has been working fine. Why I would have dickered up the second section is beyond me – I’m 100X smarter a programmer now than I was back in August, and compared to a year ago when I started this gig, I wasn’t even an amoeba back then.

This is not to say that this bug was a big deal per se – my Boss isn’t losing her hair over it and no one’s mad or anything, but it’s still annoying to wonder why I would have made a seemingly obvious mistake like this back then. On the other hand, I identified a pretty nasty bug that’s been broken for some time now, and people are just now starting to complain. I guess it happens to everyone.