Job

The Testing of Job

There was a developer in the land of Production, whose name was Job; and that developer was perfect and upright, and one that feared downtime and eschewed technical debt.

And there were born unto him seven microservices and three monoliths.

His substance also was seven thousand lines of code, and three thousand unit tests, and five hundred integration tests, and fifty end-to-end tests, and a very great household of Docker containers; so that this developer was the greatest of all the engineers of the east coastAnd Job's test coverage was 100%, and his code reviews were thorough, and his documentation was complete. The Lord looked upon his GitHub profile and saw that it was green..

Satan Enters the Chat

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Architect, and Satan came also among them (via Slack).

And the Architect said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?"

Then Satan answered the Architect, and said, "From going to and fro in the codebase, and from walking up and down in it."

And the Architect said unto Satan, "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright developer, one that feareth bugs and escheweth bad practices?"

Then Satan answered the Architect, and said, "Doth Job fear bugs for nought? Hast not thou made a hedge about him, and about his code, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his repositories are increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face."

And the Architect said unto Satan, "Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon his production database put not forth thine hand."

The First Wave of Disasters

class JobsTrials:
    def __init__(self):
        self.day = "deployment_friday"
        self.time = "4:59 PM"
    
    def first_messenger(self):
        return "The CI/CD pipeline has failed, and all your tests are red"
    
    def second_messenger(self):
        return "The Kubernetes cluster has fallen, and all pods are crashed"
    
    def third_messenger(self):
        return "npm audit has found 47,000 vulnerabilities, all critical"
    
    def fourth_messenger(self):
        return "Your main database has corrupted, and the backups have failed"

Then Job arose, and rent his hoodie, and shaved his head (into a mohawk), and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, and said:

"Naked came I out of bootcamp, and naked shall I return thither: the Architect gave, and the Architect hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Architect."

In all this Job sinned not, nor charged the Architect foolishlyJob did not even leave a one-star review or complain on Twitter. His faith in the system remained unshaken..

The Second Test

And the Architect said unto Satan, "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that he still maintains his test coverage?"

And Satan answered the Architect, and said, "Code for code: yea, all that a developer hath will they give for their uptime. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his development environment, and he will curse thee to thy face."

So went Satan forth from the presence of the Architect, and smote Job with painful merge conflicts from the sole of his footer to the crown of his header.

And Job's wife said unto him, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Curse the system, and rage quit."

But he said unto her, "Thou speakest as one of the foolish junior developers speaketh. What? Shall we receive good UX from the Architect, and shall we not receive bugs also?"

Job's Three Friends (Senior Developers)

Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the React Developer, and Bildad the Backend Architect, and Zophar the DevOps Engineer: for they had made an appointment together to come to debug with him and to comfort him.

// Seven days and seven nights they sat debugging
// And none spake a word, for they saw the codebase was very broken

const debugging_session = {
    day1: "Silent contemplation of the logs",
    day2: "Silent reading of Stack Overflow",
    day3: "Silent git blame",
    day4: "Silent weeping",
    day5: "Silent coffee consumption",
    day6: "Silent existential crisis",
    day7: "Finally, someone speaks..."
};

Job's Lament

After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said:

"Let the day perish wherein I learned to code, and the night in which it was said, 'There is a programmer born.'"

"Why did I not refuse the internship? Why did I not say 'no' to the startup?"

"For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept in a non-technical role: then had I been at rest."

The Friends' Accusations

Eliphaz the React Developer: "Surely thou hast not followed best practices. Thy components are not pure, and thy state management is chaos."

Bildad the Backend Architect: "Doth the Compiler pervert justice? If thy code were clean, surely it would run."

Zophar the DevOps Engineer: "Your infrastructure as code must have sinned. The cloud does not punish without cause."

Job's Defense

"Miserable debuggers are ye all! I have heard many such things from Stack Overflow."

"My code was clean! My tests were green! My documentation was complete!"

"Though the system slay me, yet will I trust in it: but I will maintain mine own ways before it."

"I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that it shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see the code compileThis is perhaps the most profound statement of faith in all of scripture: believing your code will eventually work even when everything suggests otherwise.."

The Voice from the Cloud (Computing)

Then the Architect answered Job out of the whirlwind (of the server room), and said:

"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a developer; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me."

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the internet? Declare, if thou hast understanding."

"Who hath laid the measures of the TCP/IP protocol, if thou knowest?"

"Hast thou entered into the springs of the deep web? Or hast thou walked in the search of the dark web?"

"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of microservices, or loose the bands of the monolith?"

"Knowest thou the ordinances of the cloud? Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?"

"Canst thou understand the regex which thou thyself hast written six months ago?"

Job's Humility

Then Job answered the Architect, and said:

"I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not."

"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the documentation: but now mine eye seeth thee in the source code. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes (and promise to write better error handling)."

The Restoration

So the Architect blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand lines of clean code, and six thousand unit tests with 100% coverage, and a thousand microservices, and a thousand containers.

He had also seven new services and three beautiful monoliths that were properly maintained.

After this lived Job an hundred and forty sprints, and saw his code, and his code's forks, even four versions.

So Job died, being old and full of days, with a green contribution graph.

The Moral

def the_lesson_of_job():
    """
    Sometimes bad things happen to good code.
    Sometimes good developers face catastrophic failures.
    Sometimes the system tests us not because we've failed,
    But to prove that we can endure.
    
    The question is not 'Why do bad things happen to good code?'
    The question is: 'Will you keep coding anyway?'
    """
    return "Yes. Always yes."

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Thus ends the Book of Job, Full-Stack Developer "The Architect gave, and the Architect hath taken away" "Blessed be the name of the Architect" "Also, always keep backups of your backups"