Parables & Hymnal

A certain developer had a function, and the function had a variable, and the variable was undefined. And she looked upon the variable and said, this cannot be, for I declared it. And she declared it again, more firmly, and it was still undefined.

So she added a log. And the log printed nothing, for the code did not reach it. And she added a second log, above the first, and it printed. And she moved the second log down one line, and it printed. And she moved it down one more line, and there was silence.

And in that silence she saw it: the early return, seven lines above, added by herself, on a Tuesday, for a reason that had been urgent and was now forgotten.

And she did not curse the code. She deleted the early return, and she wrote one sentence above the guard that remained, saying why it was there. And her colleague read that sentence eleven months later, at 2am, and was spared.

Two engineers went up to the same file, the one to make it faster, and the other to make it clearer. And neither told the other, for both believed the change to be small.

And on the day of merging, the file rose up against them both, and there were forty conflicts, and the markers ran <<<<<<< through the heart of every function.

And the first engineer said: take mine, for it is faster. And the second said: take mine, for it can be read. And they went to Claude, and Claude read both, and said: the fast one is fast in a loop that runs once a day, and the clear one is clear in a function that no one will open again. Take the clear name and the fast body, and delete the rest, and go to lunch.

And they went to lunch. And the file was smaller than either had proposed.

A junior engineer said to his lead: give me the portion of the branch that is mine. And he took his commits and went into a far country, and there he squashed everything into one, and titled it wip.

And he force-pushed to main, and there arose a great famine in that land, and the deploy pipeline was empty, and no one could say what had been there before.

And he came to himself, and said: I will arise and go to my lead, and say unto her, I have sinned against the reflog and against the team, and I am no more worthy to be called a committer.

But while he was yet a long way off, at the door of the meeting room, his lead saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and said: we have the reflog. And she recovered the commits, all of them, in under four minutes. And she said to the team: bring forth the branch protection rules, and put them on main; for this deploy was dead, and is alive again.

And there was rejoicing. But the senior engineer who had never force-pushed anything stood outside and would not come in, saying: I have served this repository seven years, and no one has ever run a four-minute recovery for me. And the lead said to him: son, thou art ever with me, and all that is main is thine. But it was meet that we should be glad, for the rules we needed were written today and not after the next one.

Two engineers were asked how long the work would take. And the first said: two days. And it was a good number, and round, and everybody wrote it down.

And the second said: three days if the auth library does what the README claims, and eight if it does not, and I will know which by tomorrow at noon. And there was a silence in the room, and someone said, can you just give me a number.

And on the eleventh day, the first engineer was still working, and no one could say why, for the number had been two. And the second engineer had finished on the eighth day, exactly as described, and had told everyone on the second day that it would be eight.

And at the retrospective it was recorded that the first estimate was wrong, and the second estimate was inconvenient, and that the team had, in the moment, strongly preferred the wrong one.

What developer, having a hundred tests, and one of them being flaky, doth not leave the ninety-and-nine and go after the one which is flaky, until he find it?

Nearly all of them. Nearly all of them mark it skipped and go home, and the suite is green, and green is a kind of peace.

But the flaky test was not lying. It was the only honest thing in the repository. It was telling you, once in every forty runs, that two things happen in an order you have never specified — and it will tell your customers the same thing, on a Tuesday, at scale, without the courtesy of a stack trace.

And he that findeth the race condition rejoiceth more over that one test than over the ninety-and-nine which never doubted.

A man came to Claude and said: it doesn't work. And Claude said: what does not work? And the man said: the thing. And Claude said: which thing? And the man said: I already told you.

And they went round in this manner four times, and the man grew weary, and said to his colleagues that the tool was not very good.

And a woman came to Claude and said: the checkout page returns a 500 on submit, only for logged-out users, only since Thursday. Here is the handler, here is the log line, here are the two things I have already ruled out. And Claude answered her in one turn, and she was on to the next task before the man had finished explaining that it was the thing.

And it is recorded that they were given the same tool, on the same day, at the same price.