Of course the journey of a thousand miles begins with a flat tyre and a broken fan belt. I made the crucial mistake of letting my iPhone update to iOS 6.0 late last week. This led to my needing a new (1.6GB) update to Xcode 4.5, which proceeded to require me to revise the UITouch code as they changed the library interface. Nothing earth shattering and hardly an unknown unknown, but it’s a significant time drain how often something like this happens and makes software development about much more than software architecture and code implementation (this is the second time updating my iPhone iOS has required other code updates…last time I had to update my Mac OS as well as Xcode, which took several hours on a much slower connection and caused my perforce server settings to get blitzed, adding some extra superfuntimes).
Just for fun* I’m going to document other random delays caused by technology in the comments section below. I expect this list to be quite long by the time I ship.
*for some definition of “fun” YMMV
Tiny Fragmented Blog 
I find this is frequently the way. The things that slow you down aren’t the hefty algorithm bits, unless you’re doing something very unusual. It’s the bloody version control deciding to mangle your code, and the 6 hours it takes to unmangle it.
I wish software engineering was easier and more plug and play. I guess if it was it wouldn’t be so well paid and the app store would be even more over-saturated. It’s all those little fiddly bits that I generally hate and get almost zero satisfaction from fixing. The rest of it makes up for it though 🙂
One hour lost by Xcode refusing to pay attention to changes made in the Valid Architecture tab in project settings. Eventually found the file it would have updated, opened it in textedit and changed it by hand.