Thirteen
On Thursday morning a product manager sends a waspish message to the dashboard Slack channel, saying that they’re trying to pull a report but only getting a blank page that reads:
IndexError—please provide a valid index
All the guys are either busy or absent, so I decide to take a look for myself. If I can’t figure out how to fix it, my logic is that if I can at least try and findwherethe problem is, I can quietly nudge my curly-haired champion John to fix it when he’s off his call.
I log in and start to comb for the reports, looking for the function I need. The odds of me fixing the broken report are low. The odds of me crashing the entire dashboard with an errant keystroke are a lot higher, but luckily I have enormous experience in this field—I have been haunting my sister’s socials for years, careful to leave no trace.
After several minutes of scrolling, IthinkI might be in the right place but am no wiser as to what the problem is, and am just about to give up, when a line of code catches myeye.
Brian the Dinosaur is with me in this moment, whispering,is the index out of range?It is. It is out of range!
I can actually fix this. Holy shit!
I tweak the code, switching it from(my_list[5])to(my_list[4]), hit save, then refresh the dashboard. The error is gone.
I am—no exaggeration—a fucking genius. My chest swells. I flap my hands like a baby duck hitting the water for the first time. I am high on life, with absolutely no one to share it with.
—
John is the first one to reappear, and I pounce immediately. “GUESS what.”
He deposits his computer back on his desk. “What? No wait, I want to guess. OK,” he muses. “You…just found out you’re the lost princess of a small European country.”
“Be serious.”
“You saw a ghost and it tried to speak to you.”
“Where do you even come up with these?No.”
“OK, tellme.”
I can’t contain my excitement. “I fixeda line of code!”
He blinks. “I’m going to need more information.”
“One of the product managers was grousing they kept getting an index error when they tried to pull a report. So I went in to look, and I fixedit!”
John leans forward and gives me a high five across the desks. “That is awesome. What was the fix?”
“It was out of range!”
The enthusiasm I’m feeling about this is not normal. Next I’ll be learning chess.
John is pleased. “Four weeks in DatStrat and you’re already one of us. Now all you need is a cool pair of glasses.”
—
Connor returns from whatever long, drawn-out meeting he’s been in, looking particularly harassed. I watch as he logs back into his desktop, checks his inbox, sighs deeply, closes it, then checks the Slack channel and starts scrolling.
I see the moment he reads the message about the report error, and then my reply. He turns toward me, eyebrow raised.
“What’s this?” he asks, pointing at the screen.
I don’t even bother to pretend I haven’t been watching his every move. “All taken care of. I figured it out.”
“Did John fix it for you?” He’s almost petulant when he says this, like the only person I should be asking to fix things ishim.
