Today is holiday in the US, where we celebrate a cosplay version of history with big meals and getting frustrated with our family. It's also a day where we are thankful- usually to not be at work, but also, thankful to not work with Brad. Original --Remy

Anita parked outside the converted garage, the printed graphic reading Global Entertainment Strategies (GES) above it. When the owner, an old man named Brad, had offered her a position after spotting her in a student computer lab, she thought he was crazy, but a background check confirmed everything he said. Now she wondered if her first intuition was correct.

“Anita, welcome!” Brad seemed to bounce like a toddler as he showed Anita inside. The walls of the converted garage were bare drywall; the wall-mounted AC unit rattled and spat in the corner. In three corners of the office sat discount computer desks. Walls partitioned off Brad’s office in the fourth corner.

He practically shoved Anita into an unoccupied desk. The computer seemed to be running an unlicensed version of Windows 8, with no Office applications of any kind. “Ross can fill you in!” He left the office, slamming the door shut behind him.

“Hi.” Ross rolled in his chair from his desk to Anita’s. “Brad’s a little enthusiastic sometimes.”

“I noticed. Uh, he never told me what game we’re working on, or what platform. Not even a title.”

Ross’s voice lowered to a whisper. “None of us know, either. We’ve been coding in Unity for now. He hired you as a programmer, right? Well, right now we just need someone to manage our documentation. I suggest you prepare yourself.”

Ross led Anita into Brad’s office. Above a cluttered desk hung a sagging whiteboard. Every square inch was covered by one, sometimes several, overlapping sticky notes. Each had a word or two written in Brad’s scrawl.

“We need more than just random post-its with ‘big guns!’ and ‘more action!’” Ross said. “We don’t even know what the title is! We’re going crazy without some kind of direction.”

Anita stared at the wall of sticky notes, feeling her sanity slipping from her mind like a wet noodle. “I’ll try.”

Sticky Escalation

Brad, can we switch to Word for our documentation? It’s getting harder
to read your handwriting, and there’s a lot of post-its that have
nothing to do with the game. This will make it easier to proceed with
development. -Anita

Two minutes after she sent the email, Brad barged out of his office. “Anita, why spend thousands of dollars on software licenses when this works just fine? If you can’t do your job with the tools you have, what kind of a programmer does that make you?”

“Brad, this isn’t going to work forever. Your whiteboard is almost out of room, and you won’t take down any of your non-game stickies!”

“I can’t take any of them down, Anita! Any of them!” He slammed the door to his office behind him.

The next day, Anita was greeted at the door by the enthusiastic Brad she had met before the interview. “I listened to reason, Anita. I hope this is enough for you to finish this documentation and get coding again!”

Brad led Anita into his office. On every wall surface, over the door, even covering part of the floor, were whiteboards. Sticky notes dotted nearly a third of the new whiteboard space.

“Now, Anita, if I don’t see new code from you soon, I may just have to let you go! Now get to work!”

Anita went to sit at her desk, then stopped. Instead, she grabbed a bright red sticky note, wrote the words “I QUIT” with a sharpy, barged into Brad’s office, and stuck it to his monitor. Brad was too stunned to talk as she left the converted garage.

The Avalanche

“Are you doing better?” Jason called Anita a few weeks later. Their short time together at GES has made them comrades-in-arms, and networking was crucial in the business.

“Much,” she said. “I got a real job with an indie developer in Santa Monica. We even have a wiki for our framework!”

“Well, listen to this. The day after you quit, the AC unit in the garage broke. I came into work to see Brad crying in a corner in his office. All of the sticky notes had curled in the humidity and fallen to the floor. The day after he got us all copies of Word.

“Too bad we still don’t know what the title of the game is.”

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One of the clients for Rudolf's company was getting furious with them. The dev team was in constant firefighting mode. No new features ever shipped, because the code-base was too fragile to add new features to without breaking something else. What few tests existed were broken. Anyone put on the project burned out and fled in months, sometimes weeks, and rarely after only a few days.

Rudolf wasn't too pleased when management parachuted him into the project to save it. But when he pulled the code and started poking around, it looked bad but not unsalvageable. The first thing he noticed is that, when following the instructions in the README, he couldn't build and run the application. Or maybe he wasn't following the instructions in the README, because the README was a confusing and incoherent mess, which included snippets from unresolved merges. Rudolf's first few days on the project were spent just getting it building and running locally, then updating the README. Once that was done, he started in on fixing the broken tests. There was a lot of work to be done, but it was all doable work. Rudolf could lay out a plan of how to get the project back on track and start delivering new features.

It's about then that Steve, the product owner, called Rudolf in to his office. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Rudolf blinked. "Um… what I was asked to do?"

"Three days and you just commit a README update? A couple of unit tests?"

"Well, it was out of date and meant I couldn't-"

"Our client is crazy about their business," Steve said. "Not about READMEs. Not about unit tests. None of that actually helps their business."

Rudolf bit back a "well, actually," while Steve ranted.

"Next thing you're going to tell me is that we should waste time on refactoring, like everybody else did. Time is money, time is new features, and new features are money!"

Suddenly, Rudolf realized that the reason the project had such a high burnout rate had nothing to do with the code itself. And while Rudolf could fix the code, he couldn't fix Steve. So, he did what everyone else had done: kept his head down and struggled through for a few months, and kept poking his manager to get him onto another project. In the meantime, he made this code slightly better for the next person, despite Steve's ranting. Rudolf eventually moved on, and Steve told everyone he was the worst developer that had ever touched the project.

The customer continued to be unhappy.

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Back in the heady days of the DotCom Bubble, startups were thick on the ground, and Venture Capital money was a flood- lifting startups atop a tsunami only to crash them back into the ground a short time later. Taliesyn once worked for one such startup.

Taliesyn's manager, Irving, was an expert in AI. In the age of the DotCom Bubble, this meant Irving knew LISP. Knowing LISP was valuable here, because their core product was a database system built on LISP- specifically the Common LISP Object System, an object-oriented bolt-on for LISP.

It was an object-oriented database system, akin to the modern NoSQL databases, but its architecture left a few things to be desired. First, since disk reads and writes were expensive operations, the system avoided them. All updates to data were done in memory, and someday, at some point, when the program felt like it, the changes would be written to disk. This meant that any failures or crashes could lose potentially days of data. Worse, the data was stored in one gigantic text file, which meant corruption could easily take out the entire database.

These were legitimate problems, and due to the architecture, they were going to be challenging to resolve. That was the startup life, however- they had a minimum viable product, and just needed to pour energy into making it something worth using.

Everyone looked to Irving, the AI and LISP expert, to guide them through this.

Irving saw where the real problems lay. "Your database doesn't support SQL," Irving said.

"Well, sure," Taliesyn said. "That's our selling point."

Irving nodded, and then, speaking slowly, as if to a particularly dense child, said, "A database needs to support SQL."

"I mean, a relational database, sure," Taliesyn said, "but we're using an object oriented data model which means we don't need to do joins or-" Taliesyn kept talking, explaining why their database didn't support SQL, why it shouldn't support SQL, and why SQL support was not only off the roadmap, but so far off the roadmap that it was labelled "Here there be dragons."

Irving nodded along, and ended the conversation with a, "Sure, that makes sense."

Everything was fine for a few weeks, until one of Taliesyn's peers on a different team, Angela, shot him an email: "Hey, marketing is getting antsy about a SQL demo, and I've got half a dozen features blocked until you get me a build with that functionality. What's the timeline like?"

Taliesyn was uncertain about what the timeline was like, since he had now clearly slipped into a parallel universe. He politely informed his peer that he had no idea what was going on, but would find out. It didn't take a great sleuth to figure out that Irving had started appending his own features to the roadmap.

Taliesyn tracked Irving down and demanded to know what was going on.

"A customer is already using it!" Irving protested. "They wrote it themselves! So we should be able to do it easily. Frankly, it's embarrassing to say that we can't do something with our own tools that the customer is already doing!"

Taliesyn knew that Irving was either wrong or lying, and asked to talk to the customer. Irving was, in fact, wrong. The customer had used LISP to write an extension to their object database (another one of those selling point features), and this extension used ODBC to open a connection to a relational database. This let them move data between the two different database systems.

"Irving," Taliesyn said, "they're not using SQL on our database, they're connecting to a relational database and using SQL there. SQL doesn't make sense for our data structure! We don't have tables, or keys, or relationships. It's objects! You're promising features that we can't deliver."

Irving was unmoved. "We are making a database. A database must have SQL capability. It's structured query language- it's right there in the name! Our structure should be queried by structured query language."

Taliesyn tried going over Irving's head, but upper management had no interest in actually solving personnel problems. Irving's buzzword laden ideas about why SQL was required seemed to jive with what their customers wanted, and the idea of shipping a non-SQL database was getting lost in the endless quest for the next round of VC funding.

The result was a bolted on monster of broken implementations of SQL that infuriated the few customers who tried it, Irving got promoted, and Taliesyn ran as far from the trainwreck as possible before the company flamed out.

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Alan worked on a website which had a weekly event which unlocked at 9PM, Saturday, Eastern Time. The details of the event didn't matter, but this little promotion had been running for about a year and a half, without any issues.

Until one day, someone emailed Alan: "Hey, I checked the site on Sunday, and the countdown timer displays 00:00:00."

Alan didn't check their email on Sunday, and when they checked the site, everything was fine, so he set himself a reminder to check things out next Sunday, and left things alone for a week.

Well, Alan forgot on Sunday. It was his day off after all, but he did remember to check first thing on Monday. When he came in, the timer read 00:00:00. Alan had a twelve o'clock flasher. Oddly, when he checked it after grabbing some coffee, the timer now showed the correct value.

It was time to dig through the code. Now, this story happened quite some time ago, so the countdown timer itself was a Flash widget. But the widget received a parameter from the HTML DOM, which itself was generated by PHP, and it didn't take long to find the SQL query it was using to find the next event: SELECT next_event FROM event_timer.

Yes, event_timer was a one column, one row table. A quick search through the codebase found the table referenced only one other place: backend_settimer.php.

All the pieces came together: resetting the timer was an entirely manual process. Every Monday, Tina came in, and assuming she remembered, she reset the timer. Some days she did it late, or forgot entirely. Some weeks, she was on vacation. Maybe she remembered to delegate, maybe she didn't.

For roughly 72 weeks, this had been how things had been working.

The good news was that the date was getting parsed with the PHP strtotime function, which meant Alan merely had to go to the backend_settimer.php and set the value to Next Saturday 9pm, and let Tina know she didn't need to do this anymore.

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