FnFiction

“Plugins, loaders, long build times. Fuck all this shit”.

Henry was frustrated. All he desired was to do be up to date with the newest and sexiest technologies out there. He normally used Gulp for his personal projects but his latest one was meant to be an open source project so, not wanting to appear out of the zeitgeist, he opted to use Webpack instead.

It would be a node package. He had a grand vision for it and wanted everyone to use his tool but roadblocks were already in place. It had been two long hours and all he had to show for it was a dependency list filled with countless packages that Webpack needed and a kludge of a build configuration, half of which he had already forgotten the function of.

He didn’t like how this was starting out. It’s as if Webpack had been teasing him  with noncommittal promises of productivity while keeping him from even touching his own package, the whole purpose of this exercise. How other JS developers dealt with this was a mystery to him.

Apoorva woke up refreshed, it was a restful evening. She had met up with a client the previous day who wanted her to penetrate his systems. “Expose everything, get as deep as you can”, he said. No, he pleaded. His company hadn’t taken security seriously until a recent break-in. Now they were scrambling to cover their asses in the midst of all the fallout.

There wasn’t much else to do for the day so she decided to spend the morning doing a cursory scan of their systems, starting with a database server they had pulled out of production for her to work on. The first thing she noticed was that they were running an outdated version of Cassandra. She fired up a Metasploit module she had written for a previous job.

“Let’s see how you like this”, she whispered. With the module, she deposited her payload in the database server. Metasploit’s connection to the server suddenly cut off. Cassandra went down on Apoorva.

Pleased, Apoorva closed her laptop and made breakfast. She always enjoyed a bit of fun in the morning.

Ted was doing some serious io with his partner. They were fooling around with the shared resources on their team’s server. The application they wrote had high frequency reads and high frequency writes, unfathomable ins and outs. All done without a mutex lock.

They knew how risky and stupid it was. Anyone could come in any moment without that lock and change everything, but the danger of having their “fun session” exposed thrilled him.

Jen was surprised that Greg hadn’t used git before. She always pictured him as the kind of boy who had done it since high school. He sat there, embarrassed, as she closed all the windows and opened a command line.

She spent the rest of the evening teaching him how to use it. How to start a repository, how to fork. In the end she had taught him her preferred branching model and how to use GitHub. 

She was pleased with her work at the end and couldn’t wait for their next meeting, where she would finally be able to fork his repository.

After a long day full of meetings and lectures, Sue was finally alone. She sat at her desk pondering what the following week’s problem set would be. She would have gone over most of computational complexity by then.

As she came up with questions she thought about how the enjoyability of her students’ weekends rested on what she commanded of them. The idea of being cruel amused her. It was most likely their first time learning theory, however, and she didn’t want to turn them off from future encounters with the subject. 

She would make the majority of the questions multiple-choice.

Sue continued writing multiple-choice problems and reached the last one. She decided that the answer would be “np-hard” but couldn’t think of an example scenario for the students to reason out the time complexity of. After some thought she decided to make it simple.

“I’ll just give it to them, traveling salesman it is.”

She could only feel horribly violated as he inserted his pointer arithmetic into her clean code - yet, there was something strangely enticing about the archaic yet different technique. When he started inserting goto statements, she softly let out a gasp - this was far too soon for her! “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it quickly,” he reassured her, as he started to aggressively cover her code with spaghetti code. Now it was too late. It had become something only the two could understand - an esoteric secret that no other developer could ever hope to penetrate.

Credits to Lee

Wow! It’s crazy how many followers this blog has gained. It’s been really awesome to see how many people appreciate this stuff.

Unfortunately, all is not well at cserotica! It’s hard for 1 person to come up with all this stuff. I’d appreciate it if everyone pooled in their big brains to come up with the sexiest, hottest, nerdiest stuff (finger trees, anyone?).

The submission link is here (and at the top of the page if you’ve never noticed). I’ll be sure to credit you.

Thanks,

-cserotica

Nick came to the meeting excited. He was supposed to work on the class project with Rachel but first he had other plans in mind. She looked up from her screen to greet him.

“Rachel, I need to show you something.”

He sat down next to her and showed her. She wasn’t sure of what she was looking at. It looked unorthodox.

“It’s completely valid syntax, and it reads as ‘As i goes to zero’.”

She was speechless. To her it was magnificent, it was too good to be true.

“Are…are you sure that will compile?”

“Oh, it’ll compile all right.”

“Sh-show me.”

Rachel watched Nick exit out of vim and run gcc on the source file. What happened surprised her and sent chills down her spine. It compiled.

Jeff had been onerous around the office the whole day. The countless scrum meetings and hours spent fiddling with his development environment to make it work with the latest release has left him tired and irritable. He really needed this moment of solitude.

He opened his laptop with anticipation. His latest personal project had been misbehaving, it needed some special attention. The project was some C code and involved an elegant recursive function. He was excited. C was unforgiving, dominating, and efficient. He wanted to know C on an intimate level. He just had to get inside this misbehaving program.

Jeff fired up GDB. He set a few breakpoints and watched a few variables. It was time to start. 

He first tried the base case and all seemed well. The variables were what he expected and the return value was right.

Okay. He thought to himself. Let’s try it with one level of recursion.

Jeff ran the program again with one level of recursion. 

Woah, that’s a big stack.

The function had somehow called itself an indeterminate amount of times. It eventually did reach the base case, as a stack overflow hadn’t occurred, but he was baffled at how it had gotten so deep.

He stepped the program, checking the variables as they changed. The stack popped. He got tense with anticipation, waiting to reach the end. The stack popped, over and over. He didn’t care about the variables and sped up. The stack popped faster and faster until finally, he found the bug. 

Spent and tired, Jeff crawled into bed. He’ll fix it the next evening, he has time. Besides, he knew what the problem was and already knew the fix.

Off by one.

He never knew it would be so easy to handle such a massive amount of data. It was his first time writing a mapreduce job and things have been going smoothly. So far he’s written unit tests and the map function. All that remained was reduce but he was under a time pressure and had to finish before the others came into the office.

His fingers furiously stroked the keys as he concentrated on the monitor, occasionally glancing out the window to see the progress of the sunrise. His heart was racing and beads of sweat were making their way down his face. He was almost there. 

Finally, as the cars started to make their way into the parking lot, he finished. All unit tests passed. With a sigh of relief he released it to production. As the others walked into the office, he checked his data one last time to make sure everything looked correct. It properly reduced.