One component of this demo that I'm working on is a server in C++. The guy who did the work on it was laid off 5 months ago, and now I have to add crap to it. Most of it was 3rd-party code. I don't know what changes have been made to it, since it was checked into source control in one big chunk 9 months ago. However, there is one directory that has our specific configuration files and build and startup and shutdown scripts.

I found the build, startup, and shutdown scripts kind of annoying. They all assumed that the scripts would be run from the directory that the script were in, which I don't like to do. I prefer running /absolute/path/to/the/script, rather than cd /absolute/path/to/the, then ./script. So I added cd `dirname $0` to the top of all the scripts. Another goofy thing in the scripts were the use of pushd somedirectory >/dev/null, and then popd >/dev/null. Personally, I use directory stacks interactively all the time, and often have 3 or 4 directories that I switch between, but, for the script, cd somedirectory, then cd .. would work just as well.

As for the C++ server, I had to add a feature, which I did. And it worked some of the time, but mysteriously didn't work some of the time. There was a logging framework that I tried to use, and I spent a day trying to use it. When I tried making a new logger class, and tried enabling it, the server crashed. Finally, I just hacked in some code that fopened a file, and vfprintfed crap directly to it, and figured out that I had added an uninitialized variable to a class, and, depending on what value it had, the feature worked or didn't. So I fixed it by initializing it in the constructor.