I think I'm a good developer then I read a post like this and think, "It would take me a week just to fully understand the problem. He's unhappy with an implementation -if not perfect- in a day?"
Ah I didn't start the project from scratch today. I've been working on it for about a week so far. This is a new problem that means changing a lot of the code base, but it's not a new application at this point (thank god!).
Where do you find work like that? Does it pay well?
I work for a small games company. It pays reasonable. I took a pay cut to work here from working in enterprise software. It was worth it :)
Thanks for the info.
The client's requirement: to move the control point of the front of a series of splines, in such a way that it interpolates between the N nearest splines, where the nearest splines are filtered at the opposite end of the point the user is manipulating. Basically, you move your control point where you want, but the other end of the curve moves as little as possible. When you stop moving it, it interpolates smoothly to the spline whose equivalent control point is closest to the one you were moving.
I had no idea how long this would take, but I wasn't at all surprised that it's taken me all day just to write an implementation. Tomorrow I need to test it. It's so complicated that it's actually impossible to tell if it's working just by looking at it. My brain feels fried.
It's times like these when you hope your project manager will be sympathetic :)