A humorous look at the stages of grief experienced during a production outage.
The Debugger’s Dilemma
It starts with denial. “It works on my machine,” you whisper, staring at the error logs flooding the screen. The red text scrolls by like the opening credits of a horror movie.
Stage 1: Denial
“Surely, it’s a caching issue,” you tell the Project Manager. “Just clear your browser cache.” But deep down, you know. You know it’s that one line of code you wrote at 3 AM, the one with the comment // TODO: Fix this later.
Stage 2: Anger
“Who wrote this garbage?” you shout, git blaming the file, only to see your own name staring back at you from six months ago. The past you was an idiot. The present you is a victim.
Stage 3: Bargaining
“If I just restart the server, maybe it will go away.” You pray to the gods of uptime. You promise to write unit tests if only the error rate drops below 5%.
Stage 4: Depression
You stare at the screen. The error persists. You question your career choices. Maybe you should have been a goat farmer. Goats don’t have NullPointerExceptions.
Stage 5: Acceptance
You open the code. You find the bug. It was a missing semicolon. You fix it. You deploy. The green checkmark appears. You are a god again. Until the next alert.