The lovely people on the internet solved my cafe-finding problem for me, so today was the first day spent coding at The End. Not entirely coincidentally, today was spent getting some of the more useful client-facing services talking to the login system. I learned two new and important things:

1. Lattes make great breakfast.
2. A certain middleware vendor’s documentation tells vicious lies.

I’m fairly accustomed to third-party software being erratically documented and somewhat creative in its interpretation of specs, but this is a whole new level of incompetence. Not all is lost, thankfully, since I already had another approach running, but the feature I wanted to use would really have improved testability. As it is, in order to get the same level of test coverage and confidence I’ll end up writing about three times as much code.

Black cat not happy.

With that wonder out of the way, though, things went reasonably well. The prototype server I’ve been hacking at is now at least vaguely aware of whether or not the client has logged in and willing to shout mean things at clients that haven’t. All in all, a fairly productive day.