Clickety-click

I’ve been pulling some long days lately. Right now it’s 5 AM and I’m still going at it. At about 4 AM I realized that the water I was heating up hadn’t boiled despite being on the stove for more than an hour; the stove wasn’t turned on. Well the water now really is boiling and I’ll soon be enjoying a bowl of steaming hot pasta.

But that’s not what I’m writing this entry for. I’m writing this entry because lately I’ve spent far too much time clicking, scrolling, dragging, copying and pasting in Xcode and not enough time writing code. Although I can "work" for eight hours in Xcode during the day, it sometimes turns out that only a couple of those hours are writing code. The other six hours are waiting for compiles to finish, editing build settings, migrating documents, doing version control, merging, testing, checking, adding targets, customizing targets etc… there’s a very long list of things that a programmer has to do that aren’t technically programming.

I’m hoping that over the next few days I will get past this little mountain of non-coding work and get into some pure coding.

[Update, 24 February 2006: spent hours yesterday trying to figure out why some of my projects weren’t being properly stripped, leading to binaries between 10 and 100 times their normal size! I still don’t fully understand the interaction between dead code stripping and normal symbol stripping; some target types seem very sensitive about the combination of settings.]