Fly-swatter

During the interview, everything was gravy. Celestino Inc. was doing better business than ever before, and they were ready to expand their development center. They had all the keywords Gigi was looking for: Java 8, serving up a SPA for a hot new streaming product, outsourced from a company with money to burn but no developers of their own. She loved the people she'd interviewed with; they were smart people with great ideas. It'd been a long, grueling job hunt, but it'd been worth it. Gigi was eager to work with the technology, not to mention having plenty of budget and a greenfield to work with.

By the time Gigi started work, however, the deal had fallen through. The big name with the budget had gone elsewhere, leaving Celestino in the dust. Gigi's boss seemed surprised to see her. He assigned her to work on bug duty for their 7 year-old Java product instead.

A few minutes of settling in, and Gigi found the Jira for the product. She clicked through to "Unresolved issues" ... and nearly fell out of her chair. There were 8,800 bugs.

That can't be right! she thought. Maybe they're not setting a resolution when they close them?

But there was no such luck. Clicking into a dozen or so of the older ones revealed that they'd been filed years ago and never opened.

Where do I even start? she wondered.

"I'll give you an easy one," said the manager, when asked. "Just fix this one thing, without touching anything else, and we'll get it rolled out to prod in the weekly release. Be careful not to touch anything else! We've had guys in the past who broke stuff they didn't realize was there."

The bug did look easy, at least: if one chose a red background in the app, the text "looked funny". Gigi had no trouble reproducing the effect 100% of the time. All she had to do was find the offending line of code and tweak it. No risk of introducing extra bugs.

And it was a snap—of her patience, not her fingers. The codebase had 133,000 source files implementing 3,600 classes, all just for the backend part of the application. She found a surprising number of places calling TextOut() that could've produced the text she saw, and the code was, of course, awful to read.

Gigi gave up understanding it and tried the old standby: a binary search of the codebase by commenting out half the instances and seeing if the "funny" text still appeared. Six comments were inserted, and the code recompiled, taking 20 minutes. Gigi had been warned that if she tried to run make all, it'd take six hours, but that the build script was reasonably reliable—"reasonably" being the operative word.

Still, it compiled, and she booted up the app. In theory, if the problem was in the six output statements she'd commented out, she'd see no text; if it was in the six she'd left alone, it'd still appear.

She never anticipated a third outcome. The red background was gone, indicating that the output was in the commented half ... but instead of nothing, she saw two copies of the text that'd been hidden behind the red background, both reading the same thing, but in different fonts and different positioning.

Gigi stared at the screen, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. A vivid daydream flashed across her eyes: she envisioned packing up her purse, walking out the doors into the sunshine, and never returning. Maybe, if she were feeling generous, she'd call and explain she'd been deported to Mars or had suffered a violent allergic reaction to the application or something.

It was her first day, after all. Nobody would miss her. Nobody depended on her yet. Nobody ...

She flipped open her cell phone, staring at the lock screen: a picture of her husband and year-old son. They were counting on her. She needed to stick it out at least long enough to look good on her résumé and help her get the next job. She could do this for her family. She had to be brave.

Taking a deep breath, Gigi resumed her herculean task. She commented out a few more text outputs, hoping to figure out which of them was causing the effect. After another build and run, there was no text—but the text box twitched and flashed alarmingly.

There's at least three layers of bug here! How am I meant to solve this without touching any unrelated code?!

Gigi turned back to the Jira, realizing now why so many of these defects were ancient and still unopened as she set the bug back to "todo" status and went to find the manager.

The next defect she was able to resolve, putting her back on solid ground. Not that it'd been easy—the problem was in a button event handler, spread across six source code files. The first file created an object and a thread; the next file scheduled the thread in a private queue. The third class hooked the thread up to the button, while the fourth class caught button clicks and scheduled another thread to handle the event. There were a few more layers of passing data around between files, until finally, another thread was queued to destroy the object. But once she got her head around the architecture, the bug was a simple typo. Easy enough to resolve.

A week later, an email came through: some contractor in Siberia had resolved the first bug ... by upgrading the video drivers. Apparently there was a known issue with layering visible text on top of invisible text, with or without the red background.

Why was the invisible text there? What did it have to do with a red background? What unearthly combination of branches created that particular display?

Gigi didn't know or care. She was too busy filling out applications on Monster.com. Résumé be damned, she needed to escape. Maybe she'd just leave this one entirely off.

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