Bitching

I am exhausted. Today my group turned in the project, but my part of was "frozen" Monday afternoon because they needed to write some lies based on the code. And now, my promised bitching. There is a lot, feel free to skip the end for the summary:

We're all a bit pessimistic about our chances of passing. José and Julio might have a lot riding on this, but frankly, I dont give two shits. José was at the wheel after Ksenia (our original leader, a Russian girl frigid as a Siberian winter) abandoned us. So, we were left with a 4 man team with José in charge. José and Julio are exchange students from Extremadura, so they dont know how things work in this university. I from a whole other country, so I dont know how things work anywhere (not that I'm less obtuse in the US, but they dont know that. "But I'm a foreigner!" is an excellent multipurpose excuse.) And Angel is ski-obsessed jock. He works as a ski instructor and spends all day, almost everyday up in the mountains. This whole "get a cs degree" thing is like a side-project for him. So he doesn't go to class and is rarely available for meetings.

So we're one (wo)man short and the rest of us are idiots. But even with those disadvantages, this project could have been done well and at a comfortable pace because we had TWO FUCKING MONTHS. Oh no, we wanted a challenge! Let's wait till the last 6 days.

So we had 6 days to write a goddamn BIBLE of lies. And I had to write the code. The program is supposed to be this absurd meeting docmentation managment software. It stores Agendas and Actas for each meeting, allows the members of the team to add/modify/delete Agendas and Actas, and takes some statistics based on that data. Oh, and it's password protected such that each team member has a login/password, and everything the users do in the system is logged.

How would you approach this? Imagine you want to write useful software, okay? For this to make sense in the real world, you're going to want a database with a web interface. Some php and mySQL. THAT'S IT, right?

Nope! First, my group decides that we should meet the basic description of this program to its most absurd extreme. First! We throw out the database! Instead, we'll just use a huge amalgmation of unnecessary C++ classes. Hmm..also, no web interface! And let's write it with MFC! Yes! Excellent, now we're left with password-protected, user-logging software to help users share meeting data...that will be installed on each member's personal computer? THIS DOESNT MAKE SENSE.

I told Jose as much one day after he told me to write it in C++ and MFC. I explained that it would be MUCH faster and easier to write in PHP and mySQL, and most importantly, IT WOULD MAKE SENSE. Nope, too bad. They'd already started writing lies on the fact that we'd be writing in C++ and MFC. Oh, and supposedly the others know C++ and MFC so in future phases of this project (yeah, that's right, this is just one phase) they'll be able to help code, too. Here's something fun I found out later: Angel doesn't even know C++ and the other two don't know MFC. Fuckers.

So after telling me that I have to code it in C++ with Microsoft's Fucking Crap, he lets me know that I have to get it finished before Friday in order to allow the others to write crap based on it. So I didn't even have 6 days. Of course, I failed to meet deadline. That's when he tells me that I also need to write 3 "test" progams to test that the 3 gigantic useless classes he made me implement from his crappy documentation. I fail to meet deadline on those, too.

On Saturday I got an angry email from Jose (supposedly on behalf of the team) demanding I finish all that shit before Sunday morning. I'd only slept 6 hours a night that whole week, but I managed to work on that shit for 22 hours straight. Maybe the last HALF of that was USELESS, or at least, very inefficient. Crunchtime is wasteful.

Anyway, I didn't finish it all perfectly, but I sent him what I had along with a response to the angry email. I don't have much tact in Spanish, but I think that's due in part to the fact that I dont have much opportunities to practice. It seems like people are more honest, or at least more direct here. Anyway, I didnt get a response to the email. And when I saw them on Monday, it wasn't brought up. Maybe because it would have been pointless. Though I really wouldn't have minded telling those fuckers to their faces what I told them in the email. Maybe they got the point and saw my point of view.

It sounds like things got ugly between Jose and I, and maybe the did, but presently everything seems to be forgotten, or at least put out of mind. We were able to carry on light-hearted and positive conversation.

Well, that's about it. I think most of the people that read this have already heard the bulk of that. This experience has taught me a lot of things, but they are kinda hard to express at the moment. For one thing, it's too soon afterwards, and for another, I'm really very tired. Things about cruchtime, about working as a team, about delegation, about motivation, about my future career, about dealing with idiots.. A lot of things. I'll worry about turning them into maxims later.

Summary: My team procastinated. We struggled in vain to do the project at the last moment. There was friction. We turned in subpar work. We will probably fail. I don't care. Also, though I had to suffer, a lesson is learned. But I'm not sure what, yet.