Quick Surviving Garments Database Update

[hrj]

Just succeeded in getting the nastiest, trickiest part of the nested looping to work properly. So out of the three major report formats I have to build, I've completed two of them, and the third is simply a rearrangement of existing components. The only other tricky bit is the part that processes the garment search parameters, but I think it's roughly parallel to stuff I already have working. What bothers me is that I don't really understand some of the code I'm writing -- I just keep tweaking it until it does what I want it to do. I'm coming to the conclusion that I'd make a lousy professional computer programmer ... but I make a halfway decent Renaissance Woman.

Comments

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

This may sound strange, but there are a lot of "professional programmers" that don't really understand what the code is doing, but manage to get by by "tweaking it until it does what I want it to do ...". It's a bit disconcerting to deal with those (I see 'em a lot in the newsgroups for the software I work with the most), but what's more annoying is some of them make more money than I do. Oh well.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

But I want to understand -- it's how I manage to get results despite taking a half-assed approach. I think I may be able to work backwards from the manner of not-working of various initial attempts, but the time for that wil come after the thing is together enough for the debut. The second pass (after Kalamazoo) will include some invisible tuning up as well as various visible improvements in elegance. At any rate, it'll give me a new toy to play with for some time to come.