I broke the build, I broke my face.

Note: The Flex 3 for Dummies book is, for the most part, done. It went to layout last Thursday and I’m blissfully basking in snatches of free time and really cool Gumbo work. While perusing half-written posts, I came across this one that I had written shortly after 360Flex Seattle. And since it cracks Doug (and to a certain extent, me) up, I figured I’d post it. So here you go: I broke the build, I broke my face.

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I have to thank Doug McCune for the blog title. He brilliantly came up with it at 360Flex in Seattle.

This is one of those random, semi-work related stories that I whip out once in awhile that people, for whatever sadistic reason, enjoy. So I thought I’d share it here. There are no framework tips in the posting below…..

It was the end of June, 2007. I was super heads down on Flex 3 work - like really really seriously heads down. I was working most nights and weekends and dreaming about my code. I kind of loved it though, when I get in the zone, I get in the zone. Anyways, this one morning I decided to work from home for a bit so that I could finish up some laundry. Around lunch time I checked in my fixes, hop on my bicycle, and start biking down to our office from where I live.

As I start biking, I start thinking about my last checkin and realize that there was a high likelihood that I had broken the build. I had violated the cardinal rule of group development, I had checked in and logged off before making sure that I didn’t break the build. I started panicking - this was crunch time for everyone and by breaking the build, I was inconveniencing the rest of the FlexBuilder engineers. So, I started biking faster and finally got close to the office. In my excitement to dismount (and check out the new tires on my bike) I tried to jump over the train tracks that run parallel to the SF Adobe office on Townsend.

Big mistake.