Code freeze and the end of the universe

It’s that time of the year when across the multiverses (at least the ones in which Christianity is celebrated) the online retailers are having a code freeze in order to give people a chance to shop freely. This is a wonderful time for us, when we sit around and go OH MY GOD OH MY GOD CUSTOMER COMPL… oh wait no we don’t care (unless it really is a catastrophe in which case we do care and will sit here for 24 hours at a time until it’s fixed). And so it has been at the HP Lovecraft Institute of Software Design, where our content management system has been … frozen, and we have all been moving slowly.

But … there’s something I’ve been a bit suspicious about. It’s the slowness. It seems to have affected the whole office. At first I thought it was just me, something bought on by the horrible collapse of my immune system that set in shortly after the American election season passed. But then I realized … it’s not just me that can’t think very well anymore … everyone I work with has slowed down. (Except for the people who gave notice – I’m not sure how they got immunity, but I wish whatever they had could be served to me in a cup like Lemsip.)

Now that I’m coming out of my own coma, I’m testing this theory. It appears that in order to maintain the stability of our code, which is abysmal to begin with, we had to put in some tweaks. Our code is now being held together with transdimensional duct tape. In essence, we our borrowing the power that is keeping us from falling apart by tapping into other universes and using THEIR power to stave off OUR entropy. Slowly, ice is creeping across distant planets … delicate life forms are being wiped out … oxygen is escaping from the atmosphere of worlds that are spinning more and more slowly … all so OUR code can hold itself together.

So far, it seems to be working. But obviously there is a cost. And it’s clear that our little “cheat” to get through the holidays was anticipated ages ago. Yes, indeed, tomorrow the bubble gum will snap, and the poorly written spells that have held us in place will bounce back, causing the end of this universe, as anticipated by the Mayans over a thousand years ago. It’s a little embarrassing that we played right into this without realizing it. On the other hand, we’re not really a company that learns from history: and we’re also one that will always take the easy way out if it’s available. I suspect somewhere in a great Godly plain someone places a rook on a giant chess table, and down here someone saw it as an easy capture, thus setting our entire universe up for checkmate.

Yes, we at the H.P. Lovecraft Institute apologize for causing the end of life as we know it. But we wanted to make sure you all had an easy time shopping. And that’s what it’s all about, right? And with that, Merry Christmas, and if any of you figure out how to disconnect our power lines into the world of Nyarlathotep before 2:30 AM EDT, I’d be really grateful if you just went for it. My team is willing to let it pass without any QA; we don’t want the tequila drinking at our annual tamalada to be disturbed, because, when discorporation happens, I want a belly full of of masa and a head full of imaginary mariachi music. The end of the world: lick it, slam it, suck it!

In which the strings are surrendered and I briefly become a puppet master

One of the major problems I’ve been dealing with lately has frequently seemed to me to come down either to living in parallel universes that briefly touch or to the tracks of time looping too closely together. When I hear people asking for conflicting things and then repeatedly coming back to the same problem they keep blaming me for (it’s always “Why are things taking so long? Why can’t we release this sooner? Why do we want to make such a strong containment field for a second level mind rotting mold – can’t we just spray the inside of a jam jar with Lysol and call that good?” followed by “Why didn’t you test that? Don’t you always try all four thousand arcane summoning languages when you’re verifying the address validation fields?”), I am not sure if I’m reliving the month of July all over again (same on the inside, gloomy office building, but the outside now features less sun) or if in one universe eveyrone wants something fast, and in the other universe everyone wants things done right, and I’m the one that keeps getting shifted between the two. The alternate is that people want two things that are in conflict and that they’ve never read the really basic stuff about how you can have TIME COST or QUALITY but not all three fixed. IT’S A TRIANGLE PEOPLE AND THE GLOP HAS GOT TO MOVE SOMEWHERE.

So I’m in a world where the glop stops here, on my lap, and I can’t figure what the fuck to do about it because, try as I might, I can’t get locked into one of the universes that is run by sane people and every day when I open the door and walk in I have no idea if it’s going to be normal boss or the one with three heads breathing fire, nerve gas, and electriity (and on the good days I think they eyes might be seeing eldritch beings floating behind me, only they’re actually imaginary as opposed to the real ones I get in Flaming Boss Universe). I have all of the insanity to deal with and it doesn’t want to go away. No wonder I keep having group outings to buy bacon sandwiches: each bite is proof of a better universe existing somewhere, if only in my mouth.

All seemed to be truly lost when I did some simple arithmetic and proved that, basically, now that my left hand man had been sacrificed to Mammon, it was going to be impossible to ever reduce the heaving mass of evil down to something that wouldn’t randomly wipe out the grain harvests of entire nations every time we did an upgrade. My thought was to lock myself into a titanium lined garbage can with a few hundred Jane Plan meals and keep the lid down tight until the Christmas season was over. By that time I figure the universe would have reorganized itself so many times that I might actually emerge into one of the more positive world, possibly one of the ones where people believe in refactoring code AND good bagels are readily available. Or, you know, I could walk into the world in which the government has decided to

I had the dream again

Somewhere in a parallel universe to mine someone is dreaming of a dusty plain. I look out from mine and see the dead on the ground, victims of too much infighting. When faced with an enemy, we turned on each other. I am left standing with my few trusted team members: I’ve somehow managed to not buy into the “point fingers at who I’m willing to have exterminated in order to protect myself” management mantra, and my worthy sergeants and foot soldiers are still standing. But I can feel them drifting away … not abandoning me, just trying to find safer places to hide.

Then from a distance a column of dust rises into the air. As it gets closer, I realize what is approaching me is the most feared mobile metal object of all times: a clown car. Contained within the Herbie the Wonderbug exterior is a carnival of horrors: twenty four developers in Juggalo clown paint.

The car pulls up in front of me. The door opens. I am dragged inside, kicking and screaming, into the swirling madness of the clown programmers.

They want one thing and one thing only. They want me to test their code. Because, you see, you CAN test quality in if you shove hard enough.

Misarchitecting: not the crime you thought it was

It’s another scary day at Lovecraft Software. The chief necromancer was listening to a groveling status report from a bunch of his lesser flunkies describing the architecture of our billing database. As near as I could tell, when some of the more obscure settlement features were ran, the entire thing would freeze up. This had been managed by the creation of a sanity-stealing demon horde emitting from the computer terminal if anyone happened to check to see if the batch job was running. The necromancer roared, “How dare you deliberately misarchitect this!” Of course, my problem was that I hadn’t noticed it was happening (I was fortunately always out to lunch when the key process crapped out), but for once the blame was being placed on the people who had made it work wrong in the first place and I was feeling the schadenfreude all the way to the bottom of my shoes.

Comically enough, the NEW way of handling it is that they’ve built in a class three imp that is released with a paralysis dart they use to stab the person sitting in front of the monitor. The freeze still happens, but the user recovers (an hour or two later) and is able to continue making sure that all of the various magical things that accounting departments do can take place. Given their reputation for unresponsiveness, this is considered to be a change that will be invisible to our end users.

The cause of the chief necromancer’s rate was NOT the deliberate misarchitecture: it’s that, when the accounting departments of our clients slowly went, one by one, batshit mental, we weren’t getting our money from them. Now, well, our software won’t work any better, but we’ll still get paid.

And I think at times that we’re not making any progress at improving our software.

Shared sacrifices

There are things you don’t want to see and sometimes it’s not from the code or the customers. It’s from the management. And a particular kind of horror comes from HR. No, I’m not talking about getting leave sorted or changing your insurance policy. I’m talking about the kind of cold, black, wet horror that happens when you walk by their computers and they shut them down quickly and are too much in a hurry to talk about margaritas. HR does not want margaritas? The world is coming to an end.

What’s worse is when you see a meeting with all of the Cs (the TO and the EO and the FO) and HR is in there, too. Finance and HR and the big hitters in one room talking with serious looks on their faces only means one thing in my book. And it’s not hard to figure out what that one thing is when your burn rate isn’t just above your income but above your banking. Those little lines crossing have to be brought back down to reality because the bills have to be met or it’s all going bye bye.

Thing is, we’re in an unusual situation here. Our stakeholders aren’t just VCs and the boss’s old friends. In the darkness from which some of our company updates have been held, I think I’ve seen faces with more than the usual numbers of joints in the jaws. And occasionally gills. In fact, I know that the fourth bathroom downstairs has some special suits in it for those occasions in which the very atmosphere of the room has to be changed to accommodate beings from other dimensions. There’s even a special (dark grey) suit with electrified silver mail in it that deflects those crazy serrated teeth the third round investors have in case the sandwiches are late in arriving. You’ve really got to be impressed by the sang froid of the guys in sales to do presentations wearing them, I’ll give them that.

But if I’m reading things correctly, we’re not just looking to deal with balancing the books by reducing our cash outflow. See, some of our investors want a little bit more. They want to feel our pain. They want us to bleed. And then they want to drink it.

I’m glad at least we’re not dealing with creatures who want virgin sacrifices, because even though developers have a certain reputation, I don’t think we can satisfy that requirement. But there’s no way getting around the fact that when some people go into the little room with Frank, Jane, The Big Kahuna, and the creature with a blur instead of a face, they’re not only not coming back in the building, they’re never going to make it home.

To top it off, housekeeping is going to totally hate us, and this means something really, really bad: no toilet paper in the ground floor toilets. It’s passive aggressive but I suppose they need to convey their displeasure somehow.

The printer in the special room is grinding out overtime this morning; all signs say it’s time to take a three hour long lunch, and possibly invest in a pair of earplugs for when the screaming starts. I might as well pick up some pocket tissues while I’m out; I’m not going to be caught up short again.

It’s not truly warped until both ends of the space time continuum meet

Things have been confusing at work lately. Clearly, my team isn’t hitting quite the right sweet spot with our testing. Maybe we focus too much on the GUI and not enough on “client installed software and entire customer service team fell face first on their keyboards, then sat up speaking Babylonian.” (The Dev team said they could wait for an upgrade. At worst I had someone turn into a half-elf, but they said the pointy ears were worth tolerating due to the increase in charisma points. When I asked the PM to clarify, she decided it was a “feature” and okay to ship since no one ever reads the release notes anyway.)

We don’t know how these things happen; you go in with a clearly defined game plan, then suddenly the goal posts are moved and you’re having to explain that running the exact same set of tests that failed to yield any useful bugs against an earlier release isn’t actually likely to yield any useful information. But I’m beginning to wonder if something critical is changing underneath: if the burden of so many patches, hacks, and sub-standard coding choices is actually warping the fabric of reality. It may just be our reality, but I’m afraid it might be catching. I’ve heard my chief troublemaker say on more than one occasion that we’re just going through the same crap as we always have: but last week a lead programmer said we’re now repeating the same mistakes faster and faster. Then an order came on high that directly countermanded an anti-chaos order from merely a month ago. So now I think that we’ve gotten into a loop of such complex mathematical construction that we’ve succeeded in making not just a loop, but an environment in which two realities are existing simultaneously: one in which we are getting marginally better, and one in which things continue to get worse. Unfortunately I’m not sure the people I’m dealing with are in the same reality as I am: but I’ve got the shell script that’ll flip me into a halfling thief if the shit really hits the fan and I discover we’ve been laboring in Mordor all this time.  I’m also doing self-study Babylonian. If nothing else, I hear a certain company has openings in the customer service department.

A maze of twisty passages all alike

So I sat down for a meeting with my boss, to discuss my goals for the year. I had the printout right in front of me. Improve reporting, increase test automation, get team certification in building wards out of twigs and hair, the usual kind of stuff.

And he began to talk about some problems from last week, the kind of problems that happen every week. Gnomes overrunning defensive barriers. Clients allowed to switch using currencies without proper authorization. Not enough silver bullets for the enchanted handguns.

And then suddenly our time was over. I walked out in a daze. Were my goals good or bad? Were we talking battle strategy or dissecting the troop movement of an individual campaign? And did I hear something about the One Ring muttered in there?

I picked up the piece of paper and looked at it. There were lines through a few things and the word LOUP GAROUX scribbled where I had previously written “root cause analysis.” I didn’t remember any sort of conversation about any of the things on the sheet of paper. What had just happened to me?

Then I stepped on a hair covered twig. Dammit, I had just been hexed! And by my own boss! How am I ever going to work on long term plans when this happens every time! I don’t even think he knows he’s exerting this power and yet it works – you can soak up magic ambiently, especially the destructive kind.

I stuffed the broken twig and the hair in my pocket. Thank God I’d had the foresight to give a strand to my second in command last week. Looks like the ward certification self-study program is working after all.

Suddenly they were asking me, “Tell me the location of the secret rebel base”

I saw an unusual form of magic yesterday. I’m convinced we’re using entirely new routes to connect to the alternate, hostile consciousnesses that surround our universe.

There’d been a flurry of emails going back and forth. “Let’s do this Unnamed Thing, we need the Unnamed Thing, we must immediately have the Unnamed Thing.” They refused to name the Thing and they wanted me to agree to it immediately. My greater minion said, “Nay!” until I could return and say, “Twice nay!” and yet the emails continued to fly as if we had not responded.

Then, as I sat at my desk, three people came marching toward me, after the point when I normally should have left for the day. I felt like Princess Leia hiding in her cell when Grand Moff Tarkin, Vader, and the little floatie robot came toward her. I was summarily hauled off and dropped into a meeting room.

Suddenly the red haired guy with the manic expression started re-expressing the content of all of the emails on a white board. He swooped the dry erase marker UP and he swooped it DOWN and he added little numbers … and suddenly I was saying, yes, yes, The Unnamed Thing, we shall have the Unnamed thing (even though I did try to get the project manager to name the unnamed thing, which she cleverly avoided doing).

As I walked out of the room in a daze, I realize I’d been hit by a more powerful spell than I’d had the ability to stand against. Some combination of the mystic figures and the powerful glamour visible in the glinting eyes of the man wielding the marker had worked together to break down my will.

I do believe I was hexed. I just hadn’t realized you could use a white board as part of this kind of spell before. Damn! Where’s a wookie when you need him?

Let them eat cake!

Today there is cake in the office.

This makes me happy.

Yes, I can be bought off with simple things. I remember going to a pre-release gating meeting where the project manager started the meeting by opening a box to reveal four fairy cakes (with genuine fairies embedded in the icing).

“Is the code that bad, then?” I asked. But by the time we got to the yes/no decision, I was so high on sugar I was unable to form my mouth into the circular shape required to make a (nnnn)o. It’s like the fairy was gumming my teeth together and sapping my will to be contrary.

He was a clever man.

But I am cleverer. To guarantee approval, I bring caramels and peanut butter filled, chocolate covered pretzels to the test plan review meetings.

Remember: it’s still magick if you take a deliberate action to control someone’s behavior and it works. Call it “personality management,” call it “voodoo mind control,” call it some bad joke about purifying food with ketchup … results count.

They claim that by getting further away from responsibility we are made safer (M00SE)

The last two days have been very interesting.

It’s supposedly “training time.” I asked what the developers are learning to summon. Apparently it is a M00SE.

I asked what the value of M00SE is. “It means we use things that other people have made, and that will make things safer!” said a cheerful man with a Cockney accent.

“But how do we know we can trust the work of the people who made these things in the first place?” I asked.

I got blank looks.

“Well, many people have used them already …”

I envisioned a summoning of a greater demon done by 13 of our rather underschooled developers, all convinced that it was “safer” now that they had outsourced the creation of the wards of power to protect them. Hilarity resulted. I’ll keep building my own charms and trust what I’ve done myself, thanks.

Later in the afternoon I peeked into the glass doors of the conference room. Everyone was in their black robes, holding hands and chanting. A wave of smoke filled the room and a PowerPoint presentation was on the back wall showing the words of power. I was pretty sure I saw a spelling error.

Above the smoke, odd shape horns began to appear … followed by a black head with a snuffly nose … with red eyes.

Later in the day the beast made connection to our data center via the Fat Pipe and everyone in the upper reaches of the office began to lose their ability to do work. Meanwhile, I was sure I saw members of the SysOps team being tossed around on strange, flat horns while a deep bellowing came from downstairs.

Today things mostly seemed back to normal. The developers returned and the blue haze filled the room today. But then, around 1 PM, I went downstairs and there was nothing but the smell of disinfectant.

My suspicion is that a data cleansing got out of control and the M00SE was sucked back into its home dimension, taking all of the developers with it. But I’ve been known to be overly suspicious. At least a few of them ought to be able to battle their way back.

LATER: they seem to mostly have returned, but there is something strange about the way they’re dressed and their facial expressions. Are these actually duplicates of the original developers? Maybe someone got overly enthusiastic with a “restore all” command …