Raymond Chen Is Imperfect

It's true, brothers and sisters. The great man I continually laud on this blog and in real life as being basically "Jesus with a better understanding of thread pools" is not perfect. In fact, at least once in his life, he broke the build. At Microsoft, and I'm sure at most other software companies around the world, breaking the build is A Bad Thing. Since software has to be compiled, and compiling complicated software is usually a complicated procedure in itself, breaking that procedure — usually by writing code so horribly mangled that it doesn't even compile — means that the software doesn't get made.

Frequency varies from project to project: some places may rebuild their software once every few weeks. Others rebuild it multiple times daily. Windows, it appears, has an AM and a PM build of varying importance. No matter the schedule at which your software gets compiled, if you break it, things stop. Someone gets paid to take the latest build and distribute it to other people. Those people get paid to play with it, or document it, or try to break it, or try to hammer it into a web server or something.

If you break the build, those people have to sit around and twiddle their thumbs until the break gets fixed and the software can get rebuilt. That is why breaking the build is A Bad Thing, and is Highly Discouraged.

Raymond Chen is human. Humans make mistakes. Except for Jesus. But I guess that's just because Jesus never owned a copy of Visual Studio. If he had...whoa. "Don't try to run any of Jesus' multi-threaded apps" is all I'm sayin'.