Users And Me: The Production Firefighter

Content Coworker: so how did you solve the bug? Me: Ostrich algorithm From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In computer science, the ostrich algorithm is a strategy of ignoring potential problems on the basis that they may be exceedingly rare. It is named for the ostrich effect which is defined as "to stick one's head in the sand and pretend there is no problem". It is used when it is more cost-effective to allow the problem to occur than to attempt its prevention.

THE ABSOLUTE BETRAYAL of your own brain when you return from vacation! There you are, staring at the login screen for the tool you've supposedly used EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. of your professional existence, and suddenly—POOF!—your password has vanished from your memory like it was thrown into the fires of Mount Doom! Your fingers hover over the keyboard in a pathetic dance of desperation while your colleagues watch your soul leave your body. The walk of shame to IT for a password reset is the modern developer's walk of atonement. And don't even get me started on when you finally get in and can't remember how a single function works! The AUDACITY of our brains to take PTO when we do!

The sign that says "THIS IS A STOP SIGN" under an actual stop sign is basically every junior developer's commenting style in a nutshell. Why write int counter = 0; // initialize counter to zero when you can state the blindingly obvious? Nothing says "I'm new here" like commenting every single line with its exact function. Next up: adding "// end of if statement" after every closing bracket. The senior devs reviewing this code are dying inside, one redundant comment at a time.

This is the perfect children's book explanation of tech debt! The dog Haggis never fixes his roof because when it's raining, it's too wet to work (aka "we're too busy putting out fires to refactor"), and when it's sunny, it doesn't need fixing (aka "why fix what isn't breaking production right now?"). Meanwhile, the ladder in the sunny picture is the perfect metaphor for the tools we finally get approved in the budget once the problem becomes critical. By then, the dog is desperately hanging out the window while his house slowly deteriorates. The real kicker? That ladder isn't even tall enough to reach the roof. Just like how management finally approves refactoring but only gives you two sprint cycles to fix three years of shortcuts.

Nothing quite like wasting an entire day debugging your perfectly fine code only to discover the test script itself is broken. The irony of the Windows XP "Task Failed Successfully" message is just the chef's kiss on this nightmare sandwich. Somewhere, a QA engineer is laughing while you contemplate your life choices and the structural integrity of your desk as a pillow.

Content 17 Q Retweeted 10 PRINT CHR (205.5 RND (1)); :... 17h v me: "found the bug" "what was it?" me: "I am stupid" 6 17.20 97