“Wow, I can’t spell” or “Building Flex Builder’s refactoring infrastructure”

It’s funny how your brain works, or at least how mine works. For this release, I was tasked with creating the refactoring features in Flex Builder 3. That meant implementing find references, find declarations and some basic refactorings…not the smallest or easiest undertaking ever

Anyway, there’s an interface called IOccurrence that I wrote to represent an occurrence of an identifier found in source code. It’s returned back from the core refactoring engine, and I use it everywhere. One problem: everywhere I used it, and even in the interface name itself, I wrote “occurence.” Yep…occurrence has two r’s.

In my head, here’s how the conversation with management should have gone when they assigned me refactoring many many months ago:
Management: “David, we’d like you to implement refactoring…”
Me: “Woohoo! Finally!”
Management: “Can you do it for the Moxie release?”
Me: “Not a problem.”
Management: “Alright…can you make sure to spell all your interface names correctly?”
Me: “Umm, no. I’m sorry, I just can’t do that.”

As my co-worker Mike said: “David: he’ll come through with rocket science, just don’t ask him to spell anything.”

Anyway, back to the trenches