One morning this week I woke up to a very strange combination of life and programming. Kind of a "things that make ya go hmm..." moment. Here's how it went:

Some considerable time ago, I began work on a re-write of a Tridion events system. The existing system was so gunged up with layer upon layer of cruft that we decided it was unmaintainable and that we wouldn't touch it unless absolutely necessary. The fickle winds of project management have now blown us back onto the jagged rocks; we ended up dispatching from the new system back to the old code, which turns out to be fairly broken, and I have to mend it. Ouch!

No big deal, you may think, until you realise that the broken piece is a thirty page long stretch of Visual Basic 6. That's thirty pages all in one function. This code handles a Tridion OnComponentSavePost event, and in the process, saves the component four separate times. Each of these saves causes a recursion into the handler, each time from a different place and with a different data state. Depending on the state, various if-then-else blocks either fire or don't, leading to the code being executed in an order very different from what you see laid out as you hit page-down thirty-odd times. As you can imagine, before making even minor changes to this stuff, you have to marinate in the code for quite some time, tracing the various paths of illogic through the smoke-trails of your predecessor's brain-damaged nightmare. One thing's for sure - you know if you touch anything, there's a huge risk that you'll break something else.

If you've ever done this kind of work, you'll know that once you've lived in the code for a few days, there's every likelihood that you'll spend your nights dreaming of it too.

During this time, our seven-month old son, Finlay has had a virus, resulting in some fairly disrupted sleep for us all. Perhaps once every hour or two through the night, the poor lad would cry out, and you'd find yourself awake in response. After a night of this, it becomes increasingly hard to come up out of deep sleep, and one morning at five or six o'clock, and  I found myself in the middle of a dream of scrolling code, hearing a cry, but hearing it as a bug. Huh? How does that work? You hear of people with psychological disorders hearing colours and so forth, and I suppose in the dream world there are no rules. I heard a cry, and experienced it as a sort of "Oh shit, there's another bug." moment.

Finlay's back to health now, and (mostly) sleeping through the night. Maybe some time soon, I will too.