Author’s note: I hope you have as much fun reading this as I had writing it.
It was the day before thanksgiving,
And I was alone,
The office a ghost town,
And everyone home.
A few hours left,
just looking around,
Nothing to do,
But wait for the sound –
Of a page or a call or a text or a ping,
While watching a pipeline,
Just doing it’s thing.
A lonely on-call,
A solitude test,
But I was on hand,
To hold up this mess.
The servers, the pipelines, the rest of the code,
The monolith apps with their depths of unknown.
The legacy codebase, five folders too deep,
All in my head, as much as I could keep.
One thing had been nagging,
A problem to solve,
That out of date library,
Before security folks called.
A small change and a push,
So simple it seemed,
And soon this old codebase would get an update –
From me.
The pipelines were starting,
Some tests took their time,
But, I was certain,
These things would go fine.
A few minutes later I looked at the screen,
One pipeline,
Then two,
Then three were not green!
The logs made no sense,
And I tried and I tried,
But nothing would work now,
Not even my pride.
I might have reverted,
And just walked away,
But, I was sure,
I would prevail on this day!
No surrender, I said,
And pulled out the guns,
The chatbot, the copilot,
Would surely fix my runs!
A question or two,
And a diff I was shown,
A fix for my problems,
I would claim as my own.
Some guilt as I pushed,
But when it succeeded,
I yelled out in joy,
This was just what I needed!
A win, just for once,
Without shaving that yak,
A change for the better,
That AI had my back!
I was tired but not beaten,
And soon all was green,
From testing to building,
And even a deploy it did seem?
My joy turned to fear,
And I had an urge,
To run out the door,
As I had not merged!
The main branch was running,
Deploying for me,
My fingers had mistyped
‘git checkout -b’!
I panicked at first,
My heart in my throat,
But calmness prevailed,
And I gathered my coat.
Things would be fine and I brought up a smile,
There was no need to worry..
I was fine by a mile.
One sound then two, then three hit my ears,
First Slack then OpsGenie, and terrible fears!
Production was down, and it was on me,
But no one to turn to, no way to get free!
I pulled up the code,
And went to revert,
To start the day over,
Before all the hurt.
A simple commit and a push I just knew,
Would fix all my problems, the day I just blew.
A change and a push,
But something was wrong,
Github was stalling,
And taking too long.
I hammered my keyboard,
Then started to shout
As I saw on their status,
Their service was out!
My panic rose higher,
This mess I must fix,
A text from my boss now,
But I’m all out of tricks!
I ran for the exit, perhaps I could flee!
But tripped on my shoelace,
And last I did see,
The floor rising up,
And hitting my face,
And everything black now,
No fears in this place
I awoke with a yell,
But now on a couch,
My hand on a glass,
My back in a slouch.
My home I was in,
With turkey and wine,
Clutching my chest,
Asleep this whole time!
My problems were gone,
But this I did learn,
To never nod off,
While having heartburn.