/var/log/kespernorth

I've spent the last week or so in somewhat of a panic, as I was given my first bug and had no idea how to fix it. It was a very complex issue that touched on virtually every aspect of a large piece of software that I am new to, and involved sifting through a massive source tree to try and understand how the issue occurs and why. In the process I had to learn the language recognition parser generator ANTLR (whew!) whose syntax strongly resembles Sumerian cuneiform, and is truly understood by about as many people.

Well, I exaggerate. But given the level of documentation and the obtuse lack of explanation to be found in the tutorials, it feels like a major accomplishment to have any grasp of it at all.

(For you technical people, I'm working on a bug in the Hibernate object/relational persistence framework where invoking a composite ID in an "ORDER BY" or "GROUP BY" clause will cause invalid SQL to be generated. It *should* just throw an error, as the developers intended users to cite the key mappings directly, so SQL would know what order to, well, order by.)

Anyway, I've figured out how to solve the problem. It may not be an ideal solution, but that's what peer review is for. I've certainly learned a lot in the process.