Day One

So, day one is officially over. Despite the fact that I have yet to be assigned any actual work, I managed to be halfway productive. During the second meeting for the three n00bs of us, something one of the guys said made me think he worked on Boost. So, after the meeting, I asked him if he did (he actually didn't, he just used it), and told him about LibQ (a "competing product"). He said I should send him a link, and he'd check it out.

10 or 15 minutes later, back at my computer, I decide to venture into the company's product. Double-click and... it fails to start with some vague error message. I call over Skywing, who spends half an hour or so debugging it and looking through the debug logs, to locate the cause. His first attempt to debug it used some debugger I'm not familiar with ("SD"). This resulted in the debugger crashing... repeatedly. Highly amused (it was pretty funny), Skywing ran over to the boss to tell him "Hey, Justin crashed SD!" The boss responded with something along the lines of "He what?!". "I'm not touching your LibQ!" followed closely, from another cubicle.

Despite the fact that he was joking (and it was actually pretty funny), LibQ ended up having the last laugh. Later in the day, I was randomly looking through the source code for their program (I figured that would be helpful when I, you know, actually have some work to do). After not too long, I found a piece of code that immediately set off red lights in my head. While it apparently works on Linux (that's what their server platform is), it will break on some versions of Unix (like OS X), should they ever decide to offer the program for other Unixes (which our boss, who's half coder, is actually working on, in whatever time he doesn't spend doing managerish stuff). So I filed my first bug report, in which I explained the problem, and referred them to the solution I used in LibQ (yes, I actually mentioned LibQ in the bug report).