The Bar Story Parts One And Two

Traditionally I tell this story in two parts because it takes a rather dramatic genre shift about half way through and only one half is relevant to the audience at hand. But I do like telling it in it’s entirety because it’s fun for different reasons.

Part One: Deployment Policy

In summer of 2015 I started a new project at work, it was planned to be a one engineer project that would take 6 months to complete. In June of 2017 our team of eight engineers was putting the final touches on our initial release of our Netsuite integration. The company summer party was coming up, and we set a goal of launching during the week that everyone would be on site. We crunched hard Monday and Tuesday, but everything looked to be coming together. Wednesday we did final preflight checks, all the pieces finally came together. Thursday we pushed to main and handed off to the release team, we hit our mark, this called for a celebration.

Around 4pm we started rallying folks to go to a nearby bar with us, we rabbled loudly around the cube desks and picked up a couple of managers from other teams, a handful of senior devs, and the CTO. The out of towners, myself included among their ranks, took our laptops with us, because it would be entirely too much work to drop off our laptops at the hotel before going out, and definitely too much work come back to the office to pick them up after drinking our fill.

Our pack of nerds descended on the bar like locusts, we claimed the two central tables in the front room. A server took our drink orders as we settled in. While waiting for drinks a phone rang, and then a second, and a third; curious. It was the release engineers back in the office calling to let us know that everything was crashing and burning, error logs were filling, queues were backing up, pretty much if it could go wrong it was; lovely.

We took stock of our situation, the responsible thing to do would be trudge back to the office and start troubleshooting. Or, looking at the people and materials we had on hand, we had multiple laptops, multiple wireless hotspots, a QA manager, a release engineer, and the CTO. Yep that hit all the required steps, we’re just going to push a release from right here. So we set to troubleshooting, quickly became apparent that it was an auth problem causing every request to fail and get put back on the queue to try again. After a bit more digging it was uncovered that we had pushed the staging credentials to both stage and prod, ok this should at least be pretty easy to fix. We merged a branch with the right creds, got QA signoff that the release met their standards, handed that off to a release engineer for deployment. It was more than slightly tense worrying that the ssh connection would drop mid push, but it didn’t.

Somewhere in the hustle our first round of drinks had arrived. So we toasted to a mostly successful release. No further urgent issues were reported that night.

Part Two: A gay old time

The financial tools team was known for being pretty darn gay. My mentor on the team was a gay fellow who had been out and open for far too long to care about what anybody else thought. Our DBA was a big damn lesbian, she talked openly about ex girlfriends and definitely dressed the part. I was vaguely open about being bi, never lied about it, but people see masc person married to a woman, and just sort of assume.

As the night wore on people turned in for the night and we consolidated tables. When all the consolidating was done we were down to The Gays™ and our plucky junior dev. We ended up telling rather gay stories, coming out this, first pride that. Plucky junior dev was looking increasingly worried as we bantered on. Finally after about an hour of our banter plucky junior dev just blurts out “You guys do know I’m trans, right!?”. I was the first to respond “Seriously? I just thought you were just awkward, cause you know, you’re a programmer.” Our DBA concurred, our grump old dev said he had his suspicions but was classy enough to keep them to himself. We concluded the night by congratulating ourselves on collect a full set of LGBT.

Filed under: Auto-biographical - @ 2022-12-30 12:50

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