jim_p

I started up the car this morning, pulled down to the end of the driveway, and as I was pulling out onto route 113 thought, "This doesn't feel right." I immediately pulled into the next driveway, got out and checked the car. Yep, flat tire on the right front/passenger side. I got back in the car and drove back home, backing into the parking space to make it easier to get to the tire when I call AAA. I checked it, and there's a nice big screw poking out of it. Grrrrr.

I was about to call and cancel my massage appointment when I remembered, "Hey, I still have another car!" I went back into the house to get the keys for the Honda, since I just put a new battery in it this week (and air in the tires) so that I could move it to my new assigned parking space. Someone in our building needed a handicap parking spot, so I had to shift down one space. * le sigh* I'm a little bit less mad about the new battery now that the Honda let me make my appointment today. Still need to dig out the title so that I can donate it to charity.

Sunset is at 4:20, and it's already cloudy and grey. I don't really want to be messing around with changing a tire after dark, and it gets dark early now. Besides, I've got to work today, so AAA will have to be first thing in the morning.

I am so tired of running into some roadblock at work and having someone pipe up with, "Have you tried AI?" like I'm just some kind of dinosaur for not realizing that our robot overlords can do my work quicker, faster, and cheaper.

AI is starting to feel like snake oil to me, the universal cure all for everything that ails you at work. And I trust it just about as much as I trust snake oil. But that doesn't mean I'm not willing to at least try the snake oil, even if I don't believe it will work (some of those health tonics actually did work, just very, very few of them).

I wrote about my never ending Release Notes saga the other day. And I swear, I had more people pipe up with "Did you try AI?" about it. YES, YES I DID TRY AI, AND IT FAILED TO HELP. Jesus Fucking Christ, trust me, I did not want do to a bunch of ugly manual copy/pasting. Of course I tried to get the bot to do the work for me. What the hell kind of fool do you think I am?

GRRRRRRR.

So we had a product release this week, but what a cluster f***. I’ve spent most of the last week just trying to get the Release Notes done.

We have automation that produces a Changelog of what’s changed since the last release: new features and bug fixes. At the end of last quarter, in July, we were going to put out a quarterly release and I wrote up a set of Release Notes based on the Changelog at that time. But when we didn’t ship it before the end of July, the team decided not to do the release, but to wait until we had a few more things finished. Which led to us finally deciding to do a release when we had a bug fix that required a breaking change a couple of weeks ago. We fixed the bug, and then there’s always a week or two of testing in the developer environment before we release.

Meanwhile, our automation that produces the Changelog and release pull request is broken. I wait for a couple of days for the engineer to finish up what he’s working on to get to fixing that. He generates a Changelog. I use our AI tooling to compare it to the last Changelog, expecting it to just be Changelog A plus whatever has changed in the meantime. But NO! There is zero overlap between the two Changelogs, and I know that’s not right. I ping the engineer in Slack and tell him I think something’s wrong. He tells me everything is fine, his new Changelog is correct. So I get to work doing my work for the Release Notes (doing some research to see which changes map to which components, fixing the usual typos and lack of capitalization that you find in anything that developers write, etc.). The next day? Said engineer takes a closer look and says, “This Changelog doesn’t look right.” Dude, that’s what I said yesterday. I know I’m just a Technical Writer, but the first word there is technical, I do usually know what I’m talking about.

So he runs a script and scrapes a new Changelog into a text file for me. I have AI look at it, and it’s Changelog A plus Changelog B plus a bunch of new lines. Oy vey. But at this point I figure it’s as good as it’s going to get. I waste some time trying to get AI to help me match my two drafts to the newest Changelog. The best I can get it to do is to alphabetize the newest Changelog so that I can copy/paste in my two drafts. I spend tedious days doing this between meetings, and researching/revising the lines that I haven’t already researched and worked late a couple of nights last week to finally get a draft ready last Wednesday because the release engineer wanted to release on Thursday or Friday.

Apparently I wasn’t explicit enough when I said that the draft Release Notes were finished, because the release didn’t go out until Monday. You'd think the fact that I sent him a file so that he could publish his Changelog on the website would have been a clue. I was out Tuesday for a colonoscopy (thrilling use of my PTO, let me tell you) and today I spotted a note on the Community Slack that the release had gone out without any new docs or Release Notes. D’oh! I should have checked that, because the publication pipeline is triggered by a new branch being created, but our automation has been so screwed up lately that I can’t trust anything to trigger automatically. I ran it manually this morning and the docs are published now. Finally.

Oh, and for extra fun, it looks like the reason why the automation broke might have been because we didn't have a release last quarter, and the Changelog had gotten too big for the automation to handle. I'm going to use that against the team next time they try to skip a quarterly release.

Anywhoo, so that’s done. Hopefully work will go back to normal now.