As some of you know, I've been coding a Point of Sale system for a little while now. It has not only become an obsession of mine lately, but also a tool, a promise, for onboarding people who run businesses here. This means, of course, that I have to deliver, and it must work out of the box.
I know it's impossible for me, a mediocre coder, to build something perfect without a single bug, but I'm certainly trying. In my opinion, it's self-defeating when a product is released and said product is not intuitive and requires, more than anything, patience. Computer geeks tend to forget what it's like to not be able to work around bugs. We tend to believe most people will figure it out, but I promise this is not the case.
At any rate, I finished integrating the Bitcoin Lightning payment for the Hive Point of Sale today. Truth is, I was generating the invoice within twenty minutes of having a chat with 
I battled with my demons for two days, trying to figure this out. The first breakthrough came from something Brian said, something I had forgotten until I was getting ready to go to sleep.
"People just check the memos..."
I jumped out of bed. I don't have to call on Brian's API. As a matter of fact, I don't want to. I want this app to run on a static web host, so having a backend and keeping "the line open" complicates things too much.
I sat back at my computer and fought with Morpheus for about an hour. He, of course, began defeating me, and I began adding bugs left and right to the code. I deleted that hour of futility and went back to sleep. (poorly, but yeah)
Woke up the next morning, made myself a strooong cup of joe, and sat down to give it another go. Seven cups of coffee later, I still can't get the darn thing to work. Why won't it read the memos?
I did the typical thing one does in these situations: added a debug window, added code to make sure everything is lowercase, checked that no funny business was turning a number into a string—that sort of thing. Nothing!
I took a break. I just had to. I left the code sitting there for the whole evening. Too frustrated to even look at it. Resentful, even. Bastard... why don't you work?
This morning I went to our local bakery, as I usually do, to get "the supplies." I ran into some friends of the family and did what I usually do. "Hey... you guys know with Hive you could get a discount on this purchase?" (I'm onboarding them later today, by the way.)
I drove home, staring into nothingness, feeling the impostor syndrome punch me in the back of the neck really hard. What am I doing? I'm a luthier... I should leave this sort of stuff to the pros. All those thoughts flooding my mind.
After I sat at my computer to watch some news (I know, I'm sorry), my mind began to wander somewhere else.
Lightning struck my head with violence. I was using the same username for both listeners, when I had clearly made the Bitcoin Lightning address username a configurable feature. A feature, mind you, I thought important. You might want your HBDs in one account and your Sats in another.
I corrected this fumble with a grin so wide, I almost bit off my left ear.
And boom!
It worked. This feels like a bad tooth that caused a lot of pain has finally been exiled from my mouth.
Time to relax now... and make more coffee...
Sad thing is... I'm out.
MenO
