For this occasion I’m gonna tell you what’s the worst thing that can happen to a programmer on this kind of day. What I’m going to describe here, is really the worst thing! And it happened to me on this day. Prepare your tissues and be ready to cry with me. Oh, the destiny. (You’d better read this by the fireplace by the way, with a mug of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream) So much for a cheerful Christmas story, right. Come on, read on. It gets better.

To let you picture the environment where my despair took place, here is how the office looked like today:

Do you feel all the motivation and enthusiasm burning down the place?! That’s right we are boiling to deliver great work here, right, team?!

      ☕️ 

No one? Errr…yeah, okay… That’s just me taking a picture of the open space while everyone else is elsewhere between the cafeteria, playing foosball, video games or on holidays. I mean, it is Xmas! Yet I was really working! I was actually very eager to work today because yesterday I spent all day decrypting a tough bug and today I was going to write a neat fix for it. That’s the best setting for this kind of day when you have to work but your mind is already away in its happy place. No need to investigate anymore, you just need to write your code, deliver and voilà: holidays! Indeed, today is our last day before the end of the year shutdown when all the company worldwide is off for one week. So, yeah that’s really the best setting, finish your dev, push it and done, you go on holidays mind free. Unless of course your life has bugs and the ideal setting is really just an edge case begging to be discovered.

So, all happy about the perspective of going on holidays today and fixing a tough bug, my day consisted in cleaning all the debugging stuff I had done yesterday and writing the good fix. My goal was to finish quickly and leave the earliest possible. At 4pm or 5pm maybe. Then, bye, bye! The day went well, but at noon we had a festive lunch where beers were involved, so the rest of the afternoon was really hard from that point. My plan got a little compromised. I felt terribly sleepy and my fix was only half ready! Damn. I get the feeling it took me ages and heavy work to finally finish, but I’m sure if I check it was only just a few lines of javascript. Anyway, after a struggle to stay awake while typing on the keyboard, at 4pm I was done. It was working. Ready to be pushed and reviewed. I just needed to prepare my pull request. By 5pm, I would be good to go. Perfect.

That’s when at 4:05pm my mind popped a brilliant idea:

 Hey, let’s clean the code (again)! Let’s do a little more! Let’s prettify and refactor! Come on, it will be fun!

I thought, since I’m done, a small refactor won’t hurt, it can only be better. How many of you haven’t done that, be honest? Your feature is ready, but you refine here and there, just to beautify your masterpiece. Right. So I refactored. Indeed, it was really prettier. This block was now a function, comment here, comment there, it was fine art . That’s when the edge case revealed itself in all its magnificence. Chanting and dancing all over my dead code.

IT WAS NOT WORKING ANYMORE.

4:15pm

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! (body falling off cliff)
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!! (echo from a far distance)
ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!!!!! (silence)

Okay. Let’s regroup here. Stay calm. Just retrace all the steps before this. I was getting ready to retrace everything. All of it, all over again.  This. This got me fully awake alright. Suddenly, my mind was 100% with me to solve this. I so wanted to do my PR and leave. One minute ago, it was ready! Now it was all inert. What! Is it the cache? Really? Now?

You got it. Yes, this is it. This is the WORST THING that can happen to a programmer on this kind of day. Now you know. You were close to pushing and bam, you had to refactor. Now it doesn’t work anymore. Yet, you feel the fix is there, easy, but you don’t see it. Your mind is gone, and you think of one thing only:

I want to leave!!!

But you leave now with something unfixed, and it will chase you during the holidays. It’s a horrible feeling. I hate it. Thinking about bugs during time away is the worst. Because you can’t stop yourself from imagining possible solutions to try, but then you can’t try because you’re on holidays, you don’t have your computer or whatever. I can’t just drop it, especially when I feel the fix is nothing, I have to fix it, I can’t go on holidays, no way. I told myself “You really can’t do without a shot of adrenaline, can you? Damn!” No response. My peer next to me though, shared my pain and nodded while I was cursing the console with a storm going on in my head. “I understand, it is the worst” he said, “But have a good Christmas!” and then he was gone. I was alone in the dark.

The problem in these moments is that you don’t even see your code clearly anymore so much you know it, and so much you are convinced it was working. What you did is JUST a refactor, it’s the machine that is wrong, not you, it’s always the machine!!! Everything becomes a total black hole sucking up all your light. “It has to be the cache”, you mutter to yourself. You hit the refresh button seven hundred times. Nothing. Then you don’t really want to undo all your refactor because: “it’s a silly mistake, I will find it, it’s just there, I know it. I don’t want to redo everything. I won’t. I swear I won’t!” As you’re shaking, you tell your imaginary friend: "I will find it".repeat(+∞)

So, I debugged. It was brutal. Every variable got its own breakpoint. Every. Single. One. That’s how you want to play it? Okay! That’s how I’m gonna play it! I stopped at every corner, at every line number, I scanned any dark areas, and monitored any suspicious behaviours. I would randomly stop any uncanny variable passing by and asked “What are you doing here?”, “Looking for the meaning of life”, some of them said, which I found reasonable, so I let them pass. But I knew it, some of them were hiding something, or should I say, someone?… It was visible from the way they would accept to be evaluated only in groups. They would not let themselves be evaluated on their own. Odd. What would they have to hide? Or should I say, whom?… And why? One of them was not clear. Who would suspect that variables were supportive of each other? I had never seen such thing. But I would find out, I had prepared a trick.

As a group approached, I pretended to evaluate the group, but as they stopped I started evaluating them separately! That’s right, I removed the && and the ||. That’s when one of them escaped. There! That was my target! Run! You gotta run! A breathless run started for both of us. I chased it through all the validation steps, nothing was going wrong, it was extremely agile. From afar I could not even distinguish its type. But when suddenly I saw it jump a step, I knew what it was. It had exactly the profile you never suspect to be able to bring down the system. It was… a BOOLEAN!

There, I had tracked the little punk. Cornered in a no return zone. It was one silly boolean. It was staring at me, laughing and jumping all around me. What? I yelled, “Freeeeeeeze!”, “Put your hands in the air and…”, that’s when the boolean replied in that terrible high pitched voice “…and wave’em like you just don’t care?… Hahahahahaaha!” I paused a second, I was so mad at it, I wanted to, I wanted to… I wanted to make it null, you know? That little bastard! But I was on duty, I could not throw my life away like this, so I remained calm and said “Okay. You and I need to have a little talk.” That’s when I grabbed it, and asked it straight in the eyes:

Why are you always TRUE???!!!

But it kept on laughing, and laughing, and laughing. A laugh that will haunt me in my worst nightmares.

Consternated, I looked aside. Suddenly, a detail caught my eye. I looked closer. That was it. I had understood. I understood why it was laughing so madly. It was lacking a !. The refactor had wiped off its ! Really?!! You dare doing this to me on Christmas? How much of a heart you have, you cold machine? You have no pity. Anyway, I put the poor boolean down, put back its little ! when suddenly it stopped laughing. During a brief moment, its shaped was changing and becoming a little bigger, when it stopped, it had recovered its mind and said in a deep voice: “Hello, the sun will be brighter tomorrow.” Then it vanished into the runtime continuum, closing the gateway it appeared from.

I cannot explain all of it. But its laugh still resonates in my mind as I’m telling this story.

6pm

Fixed. Committed. Pushed.

I was gone.

Camaraderie

Mood shortcut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaKqyzYZgIs 

In the life of a person, the mind receives many events as input, interprets them and as a result gives them a meaning, from which it will determine the next actions for the person to do. This is the routine drill and it works. Sometimes though, this meaning assignment process fails, incorrect meaning is assigned to events, resulting fatally in incorrect actions that can cause a major crash in the person’s life. So in order to prevent that, it is necessary to operate a purge from time to time, to “unassign” meaning from past events when such meaning makes the system unstable invariably. For example, bad thoughts, bad behaviours, bad feelings, provoked by such meaning are the clear sign that the meaning assignment failed on some level. I don’t know though what will advent of such orphan events. I guess they will be collected by some other process that will either delete them or store them in some dead memory. I don’t really care.

So this is what my mind is doing at the moment !

I am patiently waiting. Eventually my system will recover better stability

If only there were green tone emojis.

— Me.

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Is there some kind of pattern here? 🤔

In the last 24h, the same thing happened to me twice. This is a clear sign from the universe that I should tell the story.

The first time, I was waiting for my train since a long time, sitting on a bench at the very end of the subway platform. I was not very focused, in fact I was all dreamy listening to music and trying to hide that I had late night drinks. My train passes every 30min so if I miss it, I’m on for another 30min wait, I know because it has already happened to me (but only a 10min wait). By that I mean that I can really easily miss a train while it’s stopping in front of me, my mind experiences some sort of reality disruption and disconnects while my body goes idle. Yes, that is weird. So to compensate that problem what I do is that I frequently look at the dashboard with the time of arrival to remind my mind that the train will arrive in **min, that way my mind can go off again and come back after **min. And usually that works. But this time, when I checked, the board was displaying “Arrival in 0 min”, suddenly my mind came back all crazy, making me check in front of me, but: Huh, NO TRAIN. What? The train has arrived but where is it??! That’s when my mind commanded my body to look in every direction and especially on my right. That’s when the panique really started. Oh damn, the train has indeed arrived but it stopped far away over there —> YOU GOTTA RUN, my mind said. So I ran! I ran! I ran until I was breathless. With all my bags, and my 2kg computer in my arms like some heavy big pet. What an awful sprint! Finally I reach the end of the train, the first door, and I am very surprised the train had not left without me because that was really a long run! Usually the train doesn’t stop that long. As I’m jumping through the first door, I pass in front of the the train driver’s cabin, and there he is, standing outside verifying that his train is ready to depart. This moment has lasted probably half a second, but in my mind it is eternal, I will never forget it. It was one of those slow motion scene like in the movies:

The train driver was standing a bit outside of his cabin to check that the train could depart. As I passed in front of him, he looked at me, and he put that huge smile on his face while I could see his head turning following me get through the door. And boom! I was in. The door closed, and the train departed. That’s just it. But…that smile…! Really uncanny. While I was taking my breath inside I suddenly realized: the train driver must have seen me run from the distance, and wait for me! Awh. I couldn’t even tell him thanks! It’s one of those moments when you think guardian angels really do exist. Yes, sorry grumpy face but you have to live it to understand !!! Anyway, I got home and that was it. That’s my big story: someone waited for me and smiled at me, it is such a big deal !!!

Then again today. No, no one smiled this time. But, same thing, I was running for my train this morning, I could hear the doors bipping to close soon, but I was still afar. The train was not departing yet, I ran for the door, and boom, the door closed and the train departed. I was the last passenger the get in! Again I imagined that the driver must have seen me reach for the door at the very last moment. This time I was at the very back end of the train so he must have seen me rather on the cameras. The train bipped for too long for it to be normal and without human intervention. So this is the point of my article: human intervention. How much longer will it exist?

As transportation becomes more and more automated, do you really think the train would have waited for me as I ran for the door? I don’t think so. This is typically the case that engineers would not include in their design. I would just be left off on the platform, because timestamp is timestamp, madam! I would arrive at the door, and bam, the machine would slam the door at me. Yet, the experience it was for me that the train would wait for me is the essence of what I would miss from “human intervention”. So I wanted to record it here, human intervention was like that.

Can engineers ever code flexibility in machines? I hope you keep that in mind in your design, remember human intervention was all about flexibility over hard rules. I can probably cross the smile off from what a machine could ever provide as an experience, but for the flexibility, if the engineers include it, it can be done. So for some who would think humans can be replaced without loss (me included), this is not true, I realize why now. These little things that make your day because another human being adapted thoughtfully the system for you, are not easily replaceable.

Engineers, remember this.

I’m saying this because in the French lifestyle there is this very strong separation between your professional life and your personal life, and work is perceived as the “evil” that consumes you and prevents you from living a happy life. Work is really the thing that gives you money, but eventually it’s like a prison where you just wait for the release time when finally you can retire. It is really like that! This leads to a very strange situation where you go to a place where you spend 30% of your time with people that you don’t know and don’t care to know, that is just weird and sad. But again, it is really like that! You see some people hating their job so much but who still come just for the money. Why does it have to be like this?

I’ve always found myself strange for actually liking what I do and being interested in it “outside of work” or go out with my coworkers “outside of work”, I’ve seen myself “uncool”, because “uh uh you don’t have a life outside of work!”. Well, thinking about it, if I wanted a so called “life outside of work”, I think I could have one. The reason for the way it is, is because I like what I do and it’s my life! Yes, I enjoy attending tech events “outside of work”, tech is occupying 80% of my mind, yes I enjoy going out with my coworkers, thank goodness! Yes, I want to know them, and yes I could be friends with them. There is no big limit for me, technology is part of my fabric, it is like that! However indeed not everybody has the same mindset so it’s not always reciprocal, but it is like that.

I just want to pin here that there is nothing bizarre in liking what you do to the point where it becomes in fact your life. This doesn’t mean that I work on week-ends or at 3AM, but it means that I care for my field AT ALL TIMES. So, imagine a workplace where you would work only with friends, that would be the best! That’s really how I envision the ideal job. Until then, let’s make the most of what I have and ENJOY.

Yes, technology is my life and it IS pretty cool like that

#ThursdayAfterwork

#Unforgettable #Incredible #AbsoluteAwesome #BigThrill #PureFactor

This could provoke some big stress and fear, in my case I landed the jump completely euphoric (imagine head spinning). This is absolutely something to do in your life, one day. It’s a fantastic sensation. Thinking about it is very scary, but doing it is something else, it’s pure joy, an ABSOLUTE BIG THRILL. I’ll rely on this when challenges arise and tell myself: remember, you can do this because you have jumped in the sky !!!

So here is my favourite tweet of ALL TIMES (childhood combined):

The Big Thrill.

Believe in yourself, you can do this !

Soul mate is a one-to-one relationship.
Not a one-to-many, or a many-to-many (are you kidding me !!!) relationship.

Get the picture?

— Me (My head is in CRAZY data modeling these days, at least this one is simple, or so you think !!!)