Noise from the Basement

Math.

Few people tell me that they love math.

It brings back memories of sitting in a small, windowless room, back in grade 11, with my math tutor. My tutor smoked cigars. Lots of cigars. He smelled like a giant cigar. I really didn’t want to be there, but my math grades were abysmal. I tried - superficially, at best - to memorize the patterns of algebra, but desire to receive a non-abysmal grade in that class was overshadowed by a large teenage helping of “not giving a …”

Routines are great. Sure, they can be difficult to get up and running, but once you have one, things don’t feel quite right when you miss part of it. For the last many months I have been going to the gym every other day. For the last month, I’ve been going to Run With Recruiters twice per week. I was feeling pretty darn good about that and was in the best shape of my life. I wrote all these things on my calendar, and felt a great sense of accomplishment every time I looked at it.

I am about 1 month early on my traditional “what I learned this summer” blog post, but I’m learning so felt the need to write it down!  For those following along at home, here are the lessons covered: 2012, 2013, and 2014.

And now, in the midsummer of 2016, amid the rainstorms, travelling fairs and mosquito bites, I declare that I am learning a lot.  The software developer that I’m married to (Chris) is a lot like an artist or a Granville Island shopkeeper.

Several weeks ago, Chris gave Ada and I a mini-workshop on “version control.” Wondering what that is? (I certainly was, at the time) In non-programmer’s terms, version control describes how, when several people are working on the same code, they make sure that they are working on the most up-to-date version that includes everyone’s edits. Version control uses some pretty entertaining jargon; for example, you “pull” the most recent version of a file, and then “push” the changes you’ve made. Each change must be “committed” to update the file. That way, there aren’t a slew of working copies floating out there and no one knows which is the most recent version. Visually, you could think of it like this:

After upgrading to Visual Studio Xamarin 4.1 from 4.0 our TeamCity build suddenly stopped working.  Actually it was working but won’t stop working.  The build would get hang after rebuilding out solution to create the IPA file.

The step in question looked like:

The TeamCity logs looked like:

[09:23:28][Foo\Foo.iOS\Foo.iOS.csproj] _SayGoodbye
[09:23:28][_SayGoodbye] SayGoodbye
[09:23:28][SayGoodbye] Compute signature for bin\iPhone\Release\FooiOS.app

The build would also hang if I logged into the build machine and ran the msbuild via the command line.  However, the build would not hang if built via Visual Studio.