In This Room
No one could tell the tale of dark, solitary despair as elegantly as Edgar Allen Poe. Developers search for bugs like their lost Ulalume.
"In This Room"
The eyes traced the script of their owner,
The fingers, convulsing with fear,
Fatigued, ineffectual fear.
The crepuscular life of a coder,
With a manager, stern and severe,
In the fragmented files of the codebase,
With a deadline to which to adhere.
In the intricate bowels of the codebase,
In the hell of a lost engineer.
What crash log, what ping, or what packet
Could structure my quest for control?
Could proffer my psyche control
In the code review psychodynamic
With no sanity check to console?
With a client this script must console,
I endured the emergence of panic,
As my editor windows would scroll,
My tabs filled with breakpoints and panic,
Through change logs, I hastened to scroll
Though not its original owner,
This miasma defined my career,
My harsh, sisyphean career.
The laborious night of a coder
When QA deems I must persevere
(Like some technical debt pioneer)
On a journey through circular reference
(With dead code my perverse souvenir)
With no ReadMe to serve as a reference
Nor a hard-coded int souvenir
A nocturne in C#, incessant,
A deadlock that left me forlorn,
Bewildered, chagrined, and forlorn,
A spark, in my mind, incandescent,
A kernel of insight, unborn
With instinct as antidepressants,
And comments in code to forewarn,
The monitor seemed incandescent,
Auspicious with paths still unworn
The VSCode plugins, compliant,
The bug fix PR as my prize,
My white cyber-whale of a prize,
My bed, a utopian zion,
Where multi-thread bugs can’t arise
Like some sorcerous, javascript scion,
Solutions I’d shortly surmise,
Some asynchronous void, I’d surmise
I’d inherit this code as its scion
I’d promise, my feats to reprise
Heroic and valorous scion,
If ever the need should arise.
But pointers and mutex are tougher,
And comments, I grew to distrust,
Their context, unworthy of trust,
And thus, I continued to suffer,
With memory faults to adjust,
With rage overflowing my buffer
I pounded my desk in disgust,
A hex on my night and my buffer
A bottleneck snatched in disgust
Swilling beer at my desk in disgust
Inner monologues seething and screaming,
“Bet it worked on your own machine, right?
It deployed and ran once for you, right?
While the dev ops team bloviates, scheming…
…I’ll be here chugging red bull all night!
I can reproduce issues all night.
You recall the unfortunate meeting?
When I warned of the number of writes?
Just a dev in a leadership meeting,
Who reads docs but lacks any rights…
…hence these awful, insomniac plights.”
Thus, my efforts redoubled in terror,
With an antemeridian Zoom,
A matutinal standup on Zoom,
Was this new race condition an error
With abandoned, old scripts to exhume?
Thus, some server-side code, I exhumed.
And I gasped, recognizing an error,
As my psyche continued to fume,
And I wept, “at this desk, in this room…
This was my bug, last year, in this room.”
I reread my old comment’s disclosure,
Like some soon-to-be-hanged mutineer,
My old hacks were a bit cavalier,
And I wept in a loss of composure,
And remembered a bug the past year -
The root cause remained oddly unclear,
Dreading one day, it might reappear,
With a launch, it might yet interfere,
And deter an unsure financier!
Now I grasp this malevolent codebase,
And the blue screen of death yesteryear,
This sadistic, inscrutable codebase,
And my fate, as a doomed engineer.
Written By: "Weird Ev" Coopersmith and AE Studio
"Ulalume"
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll—
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—
Our memories were treacherous and sere,—
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)—
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here)—
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn—
As the star-dials hinted of morn—
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn—
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said: "She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs—
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies—
To the Lethean peace of the skies—
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes—
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: "Sadly this star I mistrust—
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! —ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! —let us fly! -for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust—
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust—
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied: "This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight!—
See!—it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright—
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom—
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied: "Ulalume -Ulalume—
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere—
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed—I journeyed down here!—
That I brought a dread burden down here—
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—
This misty mid region of Weir—
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
Written By: Edgar Allen Poe, 1847
