Sweater Project

Okay, Cari, you asked for it.

It was late last night. I was alone in the middle of the cube farm, refactoring code that hadn’t been seen by human eyes in years. Outside the wind howled and the lighting arced. Or maybe it was still - who knows? There aren’t any windows in this place. The code lay there, desperate for a coder’s touch. My touch.

My monitor traced the delicate outlines of the SOA record for a BIND database file. I couldn’t help but admire it - here was an object with class. But as lovely as it was, it was all wrong. The SOA was defined in a utils module - a common, seedy library. All sorts of ad-hoc functions milled about, eyeing the demure SOA with the sort of abandon you only find in functional programs.

“Come with me, and I’ll take you away from all this. I’ll build you a module you can call your own.”

The SOA was hesitant, though. It had been abused by coders before. Once it was so damaged by the experience that it wouldn’t even compile. “Trust me,” I said, “I’ve already written the unit tests.”

With the strange hesitancy of one who has become accustomed to even the most vile surroundings, the gentle class allowed me to wrap it in my editor’s loving buffer and lift it out into its own module. As soon as it was settled, we ran through the unit tests. Together. And they all passed.

“Why me?” the object asked. “Of all the down-and-out code in all the modules on this disk, why did you choose me?”

“I couldn’t leave you there. Your interfaces were exposed.”

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

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