My Run-in With Online Craziness
Man, sometimes you just stumble into things online you don’t expect. I remember a while back, everyone seemed to be talking about that Kobe autopsy stuff. It was just… everywhere. You couldn’t really avoid it if you spent any time online, felt like it popped up all over the place.
It was a weird time for me anyway. I was neck-deep in trying to get this ridiculous project off the ground at my old job. Talk about a mess. We were building this internal tool, supposed to make things easier, you know? But it turned into a complete nightmare.
Getting Started
First, they handed me the specs. Looked simple enough on paper. Just needed to pull data from A, process it a bit, and dump it into B. Easy peasy, right? Wrong. The guy who wrote the specs? Left the company like a week later. No handover, nothing. Just vanished.
The Actual Grind
So, I started digging in. Turns out, system A wasn’t documented. At all. I spent days, maybe weeks, just trying to figure out what data was even available and how to get it out reliably. It felt like archaeology, honestly. Then system B, where the data needed to go? Totally different format, different logic. Needed a ton of massaging.
- Trying to talk to the ‘system A’ team was useless. They were always ‘too busy’.
- The ‘system B’ folks? They just kept changing the requirements. Every other day, something new.
- My manager? Just kept asking “Is it done yet?”
It was one of those times where you’re just grinding away, feeling like you’re getting nowhere. You put in long hours, stare at code until your eyes burn, fix one bug, and two more pop up. Classic stuff.
Weird Distractions
And all the while, this other noise was happening online. Like that Kobe thing. You’d take a break, scroll through some news or social media, and bam, headlines or people arguing about it. It was just a strange backdrop to the coding marathon I was stuck in. Felt like the whole world was focused on that, while I was just trying to make two ancient computer systems talk to each other without exploding.
Finally Finishing… Sort Of
Eventually, I got something working. It wasn’t pretty, but it technically did what was asked, mostly. Shipped it out. Of course, bugs started rolling in immediately. But hey, that’s the life, right? You build the thing, fix the thing, then move on to the next fire. Seeing all that unrelated drama online at the same time just made the whole period feel even more surreal. You just gotta put your head down and push through your own stuff sometimes.
