Week 10 Story: The Code Review

Author's Notes

This premise for this story was based of one of the tales about Krishna. In the original story Brahma was intrigued by how Krishna shared food with the mortals in his town, and was unsure if Krishna was actually an avatar of Vishnu. In order to test Krishna's divine power Brahma stole the cows from the village alone with several of the villagers. Krishna knew that Brahma was behind this so he acted quickly and created copies of the missing cows and people from himself. An entire year passed normally in the village without anyone noticing a difference. At this time Brahma returned what he had taken, impressed by Krishna's divine power.

I decided to relate this story to my degree field in an attempt to map the divine power of Krishna to a real world ability. Some aspects of the story were modeled from my experience during my first internship, but it was entirely the setting of the dark office and not the events or people! Character names are hard...

Binary Code (Source)

The Code Review

            It was just another normal day at the office. The sun was shining outside but the office room was dark. Programmers are not too fond of the sun, so curtains covered all of the windows; only the blue glow from the computer screens illuminated the faces of the employees. The office slave driver Philip was known to cause problems. On this particular day, Philip, in all his mischievousness, decided to mess with the new intern, Bob.

            Bob was fresh out of college, still wet behind the ears, unfamiliar with the brutality of workplace politics. Little did anybody know, but Bob was secretly a genius programmer, he only had the barren resume that landed him in this dreary workplace. His empty resume was primarily due to his crippling video game addiction. In order to belittle the new employee, Philip decided to destroy half of Bob’s code, chosen at random. This would sabotage Bob’s project, and Philip would use this to humiliate Bob during his next code review, effectively keeping all the other new hires in line.

            Bob being the genius programmer that he was had never needed to backup his code. He knew that it was good practice to do so, but inevitably, he was far too lazy. Faced with now destroyed code there were only two options that Bob could take, either to replace the missing code or the scrape it and rewrite it all. He had one week before the review and the clock was ticking, Bob had to act fast.

            Given that the project that Bob was working on was previously handled by the office’s notorious slacker, it was in shambles to begin with and nearly impossible to follow. Therefore, Bob decided that rewriting the code would be much easier. He worked furiously through the long hours of the night, consuming tremendous amounts of caffeine just to keep his eyes open. Line by line he constructed the most bug-free code that the office will ever see.

            The day of the code review arrived. As Bob walked into the conference room, he looked at Philip only to be met with the most sickening of grins. As Philip opened Bob’s code, a look of disbelief spread over his face. The code he was looking at had descriptive variables, proper formatting, ran perfectly, and most surprisingly was fully documented! Da! Dun! Dun! Bob walked out of the office, no longer needing to work for such a terrible company. With this new exceptional code under his name, he would surely be capable of finding a job anywhere.

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