[CW] Code Review

[Aphelli]

Hi! 

 

I have a lot of stuff to do (it's incredible how much time doing serious math takes and how much time I'm somehow managing to not do it), but I wanted to write out an idea I had had a few days ago. It might eventually serve as a prologue for a hypothetical story, but don't expect anything about that before a while though. 

The title is weird, but don't worry. I think it's still understandable. 

My usual "spoiler policy" applies: you may be spoiled stuff, but if you can identify the work it's taken from, then you probably already knew it. 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

Code Review

 

 

 

 

Imagine a room.

As much as one can tell from present-day standards, it’s an impersonal meeting room. The decoration is so sober as to be insignificant. People in this room don’t look at their surroundings – they look at the people they're speaking with. Its main, almost only, feature is a large rectangular table made up of a light, artificial material – think of it as plastic. And currently, twelve people are sitting around it and doing a code review. Well, more like twelve, minus one, plus another.

 

Of course, they’re not actually doing what we would call today a code review. And the table isn’t plastic. Who knows what they actually are doing? Who knows what unearthly procedures they are really enacting? Who knows how they communicate? What language they speak? How they view the world, one another and themselves?

 

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Neither you, nor me, can truly understand, in full detail, what went on this fateful day. So this tale can be but an approximation, fit to our own frames of mind. We will thus pretend that these beings are people, that they are speaking, that their language isn’t so alien to us as to be untranslatable, that they’re coding for a living (in some manner of speaking) and that they’re currently doing a code review for a Project. The Project being the important part there.

 

It was a breath-takingly ambitious endeavor, which had gone on for decades at least. Our modern minds, especially thinking of technology, struggle with the idea that critical components can be as old as thirty or forty years old. But apparently, these people didn’t care. No advance in technology could help the Project as much as stability in the tools and methods they used.

 

It was because a vague scope of the Project’s scale and complexity could be loosely envisioned by imagining a group of a few hundred people trying to make our entire current software and firmware structure, without blueprints, and, using as building blocks mechanical steam-powered parts (as in, say, a 19^th-century Babbage Analytical Engine) rather than electronics. It wasn’t that their technology was primitive. It was just that the ambition had been consistently described as “insane”.

 

It was a secret known only to the people working on the Project, and the person who had initiated it and kept the money going, why the Project was so important. Some of them hadn’t believed at first, but it was too compelling to disbelieve for long. To be short, one prophet had seen the future, and they had feared it so much that they had spent enormous effort trying to prevent it. They were aware of the concept of paradox, of self-fulfilling prophecies, but they had decided that they didn’t care.

 

Hence the Project.

 

They had used their knowledge to get a lot of money, and attract the best workers they could find, towards a single goal: realize the Project, and make it work. They knew they probably wouldn’t be alive to see it to completion, but it didn’t matter. The Project was crucially important – time wasn’t.

 

Most of the workers this prophet had found were organized people with extensive technical skills, and decent communication skills. The rest was those, far fewer, tasked with managing the organization, using bureaucracy to fight the inevitably (although low enough) emerging entropy. Their work was simplified, as their group didn’t have any customers to reach, nor sales to make. It answered only to the prophet. The recruitment had gone on after the initial wave, but more slowly, more quietly, as the stability of the organization and the quality of its production were valued more than its speed. They didn’t have all the time in the world, but most of it; however, they had to get it right the first time.

 

Let’s come back to our table. One of the people there was older by at least twenty years than the others, we could call her Matilda. She had been working on the Project almost since its start, after only a couple of years.

 

Once upon a time, she had been a brilliant young woman, extremely learned, with deep and blinkingly fast understanding, driven and methodical, the one person at her workplace you could have relied on to always go above and beyond what most employees could manage to do, or want to. Then she had fallen in love, and involved herself less. But tragedy had struck – even in so remote a situation, such clichés could still hold – and the love of her life, and their baby child, had died in a freak accident. Six months later, searching for a way to stop thinking about her lost dreams and wasted life plans, she joined the Project.

 

Everyone else on the table was accomplished and highly skilled, but Matilda was listened to as an oracle, not simply as a team lead. She understood their code nearly as well as they did, and its relevance inside the Project far better than them. She could still regularly suggest, with little to no apparent time of thought, major improvements to her coworkers’ code.

 

The review was ending. Apart from one team member who had called in sick (let’s name her Agatha), and another person (that we could call, say, Magnus), everyone had explained what they had done, how they had done it, commented on their peers’ code and noted Matilda’s own suggestions. Everyone was growing restless, eager to finally leave for what we’ll call their week-end, even if they perhaps had no such concept. But when Matilda called for silence to let Magnus, the newest member of their team – had it been two years already? – show his work, all the others obeyed her.

 

But Magnus was clearly flunking it. Unlike his usual assured, knowledgeable, well-documented self, he sounded distant, not always consistent, almost rambling, certainly unfocused and perhaps preoccupied. It did not take long for his peers to lose interest in spite of all their professionalism, with only Matilda listening to him as intently as ever, still trying to understand his convoluted explanations for phenomena, which, she thought, she could have summarized in five sentences for anyone there.

 

“Magnus,” she finally cut him off. Everyone fell silent at once, recognizing an unusual event. “Is something the matter?”

 

Magnus looked around the table. Everyone was staring at him, and the combined weight of their expectant gazes was unsettling him. His train of thoughts had been especially unclear and certainly very preoccupied today, and he knew the reason well. It was just that he couldn’t spit it out in front of everyone, not the newest member of the team. And unless he revealed his terrifying thought, he couldn’t be sufficiently at peace with himself to finish explaining his code.  

 

“Yes,” he sighed. “I’ve got an issue. Can I have a word with you now?”

 

Matilda glanced at the rest of the team. They were ready to leave. She sighed back.

 

“Okay, everyone, next time we’ll start with Magnus’s code. Have a nice week-end.” she sent them away. “Come into my office,” she added for Magnus.

 

Again, what Matilda’s office looked like wasn’t something you’d easily picture, given that neither you nor me have the proper frames of reference to understand what we would be seeing – or we even see it? We can at least say that it was impersonal in the extreme, completely functional-minded and very tidy.

 

“So,” Matilda asked Magnus, sitting and motioning him to sit, “what’s it about?”

“Well,” Magnus answered, “it’s about Agatha’s code from last time.”

“Yes, what of it?” She was annoyed now, if he had noticed something without raising it in code review, what was the point of it all? Hadn’t he been a member of the team for two years?

“Something, I don’t know what, something struck me as odd when she showed it last time. I didn’t have time to investigate right after…”

“I know, it’s a pretty tricky piece of code she’s been working on.” Matilda approved. “Even I don’t understand it too well.”

“So I rushed my tasks to make some…”

“How many times,” Matilda sighed, “do we have to tell you that rushing is a waste of time? So is overtime. Time isn’t important and you know it.”

“I know,” Magnus answered, looking down. “But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right, so in the time I created I took a look at Agatha’s code.”

“And?” Matilda pressed him further, interested. At least that youth was interested in the work of his elders, she thought. She had been working with Agatha for over fifteen years and she had always been highly skilled, although both knew that she couldn’t hold a candle to Matilda. It had better be a good reason why he couldn’t carry out the code review as usual.

“It’s very good code, very clear despite its complexity, …” he started.

“Get to the point.”

“I’m probably just not understanding it well enough, but …”

“The. Point.”

“Look at this place,” he answered after a deep breath, as if having to deliver very painful news. “This piece, just here,” he showed her, “I don’t understand what it’s doing. It looks like, apart from simply calling the core functions, the code’s doing, some, er, strange stuff.”

“Hm.” Matilda made a noncommittal noise as her eyes read the passage Magnus was speaking about. “Yes, there’s a mistake there. That’s why code reviews exist.”

“But code reviews where we all missed it? Even you?”

“I’m not omniscient, you know. Remember how last time Agatha spoke last? We’re all tired, and there’ll be a thorough test session shortly. Why did that disturb you so much?”

“I don’t know…” Magnus admitted. “But it was in a crucial part, and, I mean, it’s Agatha… I didn’t believe it was just a mistake.”

“You’re young.” Matilda observed. “You’re composing fantasy stories within your mind. You let yourself get carried over instead of focusing on your task. Yes, there’s a mistake and we’ll have to be extra careful and I’ll slip Agatha a word. Next time you spot a mistake, just do it in review and don’t look so distraught. You look like you expected someone to sabotage the Project.”

“It’s not a joke!” Magnus protested.

“Here you are,” Matilda pointed out. “You’re just living in a fantasy. If people wanted to mess with the Project, they certainly wouldn’t manage to do it through Agatha when so many other people,” she glanced at him, her eyes earnest, “would be much easier targets. Is that all?”

“Yes.” Magnus answered, somewhat sheepishly. “At least I’m relieved the mistake will be corrected. And next time I promise I won’t rush my own duties, ask for explanations in code review, and not short-circuit the usual process.”

“Then you may go. You look like your imagination overheated your brain. You need some rest.” Matilda observed.

 

She watched him leave. Then she looked at Agatha’s code again. She hadn’t expected anyone else to look at this part of the code, much less spot the mistake that had been obvious to her. She felt she had to do something about Magnus to make sure he learnt his lesson. Yes, she thought, I’ll slip in his code a few supplementary bugs.

 

It had taken decades to admit it to herself, but she wasn’t really working for the Project. It was all fake, she knew, and all a delusion of her own old imagination. The Project – the Universe, in fact – she couldn’t care less about. She worked there because she liked it and was good at it, and because it was unbearable to her that her own work, or the code she supervised, could be less than top-notch, according to her own standards, perhaps some of the most demanding in the world.  

 

She glanced at the code again for a few minutes, thoughtful. She noticed there was an unlikely, quite far-fetched, edge case that wasn’t handled properly. Her memory supplied her with all sorts of interesting behaviors the code might exhibit given this unexpected input. 
 

Behind layers and layers of little mind-gears and emotional walls of impassibility, built over decades of grief and professionalism and perhaps a little touch of aesthetics, a mind-reading observer might have spotted the tiniest hint of a smile.

 

Let’s see you deal with that, Interceptor, she thought.