geek in shining armor

last week, i had an interesting conversation with hubby je. about regular expressions. yep, it's about work.

i told myself way back then that i will never bring home work with me, something i'm notorious of doing when i was in SPI. i had so many "lost" hours, that they probably spanned collectively into days, or weeks, or even months maybe. looking back now, i realized the work never ends, but time with family can be limited. if anything, it's family time that actually has a deadline. work deadline is the elusive cheese that we keep running after, while our every step lands on that rotating wheel built around us. the cheese just stares back at us, right in the face, as we slave away, running and running faster until it burns us out.

so yeah, no work at home for me. but being married to a geek doesn't help. we would sometimes talk about work stuff, and end up consulting each other about solutions, possible bugs, and other UN-romantic stuff, with a capital U and N.

i will spare the details of my latest project, and to make the long story short, i was ranting about how i couldn't make my codes work, and how crazy it's driving me. hubby je is my geek in shining armor, who almost always wants to find a solution to make things easy for me whenever i start ranting about something. so he obliged to listen, and even requested that i make some illustrations.

at the back of a junk mail letter, i scribbled the stuff going on in my head. when i came to the part where my codes start going loco, je started asking questions. he was driving me nuts! but i kept explaining as much as i can, sometimes confusing even myself.

and in between heating leftover fried chicken in the oven, and listening to me talk, he came up with a solution. i had to keep up with his pace, he thinks so fast! so while he kept talking and brainstorming, i took another junk mail letter and started writing things down. it's finally making sense to me!

that night, probably for the first time since i got here in the US, i can't sleep thinking about work. not the negative kind of thinking, but the excited kind of thinking. i wanted it to be the next day already, so i can start trying the solution that je came up with.

after around a week of restructuring my old codes and brain-draining-kind-of-intense coding, i got my codes working. *insert cartwheel here* and the better part is, i was able to make it more flexible than what was required in my work ticket! i'm just so happy! i bet my Big Boss will be happy too! hehehe!

this blog is written half an hour after the testing proves to be successful. i just need to tweak a couple more stuff, and all should be ready for SQA testing.

and, just a few minutes ago, i called hubby je to thank him for his brilliant idea! i would've spent two more weeks on this project if i insisted on my original approach.

i just looove being married to a geek! ;-D

ps. wondering why i'm blogging instead of tying up loose ends in my project? well, i'm entitled to enjoy this little triumph, before i slave away again. =P