Subway Musings

Our Subway Hero

Our hero's journey begins near the southern reaches of the Toronto subway system: King Station. He wonders not only how long it will take him to reach Finch Station, but also about the people around him.

Is the tired-looking woman with the frazzled gray hair and large glasses heading home from her job as a librarian? What game is the highschooler in the crumpled teal hoodie playing on his phone? Where is the girl sipping a Tim Horton's IceCapp headed?

His greatest concern, however, is finishing writing a couple of hundred words for work tomorrow. Why, you ask? Well let me tell you...

Long, long ago - a week or so since the last blue moon - there existed a team of Android developers, ever vigilant for ensuring the quality of their application. What they did not know, however, is that there was a traitor in their midst! A fellow developer who had turned to the dark side of the coding spectrum...

At first, this developer learned the Java codex from our heroic team; its Set of principles and their hierarchy. But ever so slowly, a darker presence tugged at her soul, with its overly verbose expressions, header files, and evil nil pointers without the sacred NullPointerException. Little by little, day by day, the idea of prepending all that seemed normal with NS, or some longer acronym, seemed not so bad to this developer.

And as her will weakened, so did her connection to her brothers and sisters. Square braces for method call invocation, spaces instead of commas, and the Gradle gods yelled "No more"!

But it was too late and all was lost. With but a single kill command, the Gradle daemon watchdogs were silenced and our villain proceeded weave her bugs into the code base. A bad array index here, a slightly off hex value there. Our heroes and their unit tests were simply not prepared for such an onslaught!

Not ready, that is, until their fearless leader came up with a monthly program to manually test for such things! Our heroes read and wrote and messaged, and in their wake lay squashed bugs and greened out Jira tickets.

Our traitor was discovered and sent off to her dark brethren, but to this day, we remember why this initiative was started.

And that is why, our hero writes on the subway...