Lorne Kates

Aug 2013

There and Back Again

by in CodeSOD on

In an office cubicle, there worked a programmer. Not a nasty, dirty cubicle in the basement, nor a dry, bare cubicle in a vast faceless farm: it was a web startup cubicle, and that meant comfort. It was decorated brightly, with plenty of monitors and cables, a pantry full of all manner of crisps known to programmer-kind, and posters of films that were adaptations of a single book, broken needlessly into multiple parts.

The programmer was a well-to-do programmer, and his name was Anders. He was part of a coding team, and their team had worked on The System since time out of mind. It was a very respectable codebase, because it never did anything unexpected: you could tell what any function's output would be without the bother of calling it. Unit tests were a thing to be done by other folks!