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David pulled his headphones off when he heard a loud harrumph behind him. One of his project managers loomed in the doorway, and had obviously been standing there for some time, trying to get David’s attention.
“You pulled from Staging-Core branch into the Version–2 branch and broke Liam’s changes,” the PM said.
We return with the penultimate installment of the tale of Mercy, the Mercenary Developer. Last time, she implemented a countdown clock- but nobody told her what it was counting down to, because nobody knew.
It was standing-room only at Rockwood for Governor campaign headquarters. All the tables had been pushed to the walls or folded and stowed away; most of the chairs were stacked. Volunteers milled about, eating delivery pizza, wings, and (probably spiked) soda.
Rex had just been hired on with a large retailer as a Puppet Automation Engineer, tasked with using Puppet Labs to automate deployments of some SAP-py, enterprisey software. He was paired up with another Puppet Automation Engineer, Alexi. Alexi was the expert, and he was in charge of automating the company’s Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) auditing.
Alexei was a firm believer that the Customer Is Always Wrong, and Alexei Knows Best. As a consequence, he thought that any requirements he didn’t like could be changed to arbitrary ones he did like. If the customer wanted a report that provided some summarized sales numbers for the year and he thought that was stupid, he’d instead give them a report showing their top product’s Line-Of-Code count divided by the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the month. If they wanted to slice-and-dice their customer database by demographics, he would code up a line graph relating the number of characters in their last name to the average nightly lows on their date of birth.
In the continuing saga of Mercy the Mercenary, she continues to struggle with a political campaign- Rockwood for Governor- and its backwards approach to IT. Last time, she had an uphill battle getting the kit to keep their website up.
The request seemed so simple, Mercy knew. Embed a video inside an email message.
“This,” Gregor said by way of introduction, “is Jack. Jack’s our new highly paid consultant.”
Rita shook Jack’s hand. Jack was the kind of person who entered a handshake with a dominant, overhand approach, and then applied too much pressure while he smiled at you. He wanted you to know, he was a take charge kind of guy.
The tale of Mercy the Mercenary Developer continues. Last week Mercy became the IT support for a political campaign because she knew how to stream from a cellphone, and thus knew more than anyone working at the campaign.
Mercy ground her teeth. Her wifi connection in Rockwood’s campaign headquarters had dropped again.
Amanda supported and maintained a website through which clients managed their own data. Occasionally, she’d read through access logs in search of unwanted scrapers, rogue bots, and hack attempts.
Her diligence paid off when she caught on to a particular IP that was making a huge amount of requests throughout the day. Page after page of results were being requested less than a second after another, as with a typical scraper bot:
Mercy Francis sat inside a drab, storefront office. The walls were covered in posters, captioned the words Rockwood for Governor, for a Righteous Florida! To her right was a map of Florida covered in multi-colored thumbtacks. Below the map sat an aging desktop machine. On its case was slapped a piece of masking tape marked Rover.
Across from her sat Barbie Sullivan. She appeared to be in her fifties, just over five feet high, with a greying bob cut. She had introduced herself as the campaign manager.
Soundcloud Links: Radio WTF: A Day of Mei
Direct Download: ADayOfMei.mp3
Starring (in order of appearance) Devin Sweeny... as Mei
Mar 16