The Codeless Code: Case 77 The Upside-Down Abbey
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One mid-winter morning, when user logins had slowed to an
icy trickle and the mountain was peaceful beneath its
blanket of snow, host master Yishi-Shing left his servers in
the care of ten capable monks and set out to inspect the
state of a distant abbey.
Arriving, he found an unexpected whirlwind of activity.
Serious defects plagued the abbey’s software. User activity
caused minor errors throughout the database; these errors
were compounded by subsequent user actions, ultimately
spreading the corruption to highly-sensitive tables. Monks
were poring over log files, running emergency data repair
scripts, arguing at whiteboards, hammering away at
workstations. Desperate patches were released at a frantic
pace, resulting in further disasters.
“What of testing?” asked Yishi-Shing.
“No time! No people! No money!” said the abbot, who
tightened the straps on his rollerskates and took off down
the hall in response to the ringing of another alarm-bell.
Yishi-Shing returned to his own temple, lost in thought.
“How fares the abbey?” asked the monks of the Clan of Iron
Bones.
“I saw no abbey,” said Yishi-Shing. “Only a field of cold
hard earth where monks dig furrows with their fingernails,
while oxen march behind and goad them on with plow-blades.”
“Are the servers in order, at least?” asked one of the
monks.
