Happy Halloween đ! I have a horror story for you! Donât forget to stock up some good candy for your kid, and feed your cat some nips while youâre at it đ.
Youâre a senior software engineer at BigTechCorp, counting your blessings since landing this role last October. In this brutal tech market, your college buddies are still sending âHope youâre doing well!â LinkedIn messages to every recruiter they can find.
The project youâve been grinding on for months is finally ready. Your team desperately needs this win - the last three quarters have been rough, and everyone from your manager to the VP of Engineering has been âjust checking inâ on your progress. Youâve been pulling extra hours, living on cold brew and takeout, but itâs worth it. This feature is going to be chefâs kiss.
Itâs a perfect Friday afternoon, the kind where golden autumn sunlight streams through your home office window. The clock shows 2 PM, and youâre ready to wrap up early. Your PR has more approving comments than a celebrityâs Instagram post. Test coverage would make your CS professor proud. You take one last look at your deployment checklist - everythingâs green.
What could possibly go wrong?
You hit the deploy button with the satisfied flourish of an artist signing their masterpiece. Laptop closed, you head out for a victory walk, breathing in that crisp October air. The crunch of leaves under your feet feels like natureâs applause for your achievement.
Your phone buzzes at 4:30 PM. You almost ignore it - almost. Itâs your on-call teammate.
âprod is down for MegaCorpâ
Your heart stops. MegaCorp isnât just any customer - theyâre the whale that pays for everyoneâs free snacks and those fancy standing desks. You sprint back to your car, your peaceful walk becoming a distant memory.
Back at your desk, you take a swig of now-lukewarm coffee and fire off a quick text: âSorry, might miss the Halloween party tonight.â Your Alien Romulus costume will have to wait - youâve got a real monster to fight.
The local environment looks fine - mockingly fine. Every test passes with a smug green checkmark. The console is clean enough to eat off of. No API errors, no data corruption, nothing. Just the sound of your anxious keyboard tapping echoing through your empty house.
Time for the nuclear option: rolling back the deployment. In theory, itâs just one button press. In practice, itâs a prayer to the infrastructure gods. You hit revert and hover over the refresh button, watching the deployment botâs updates scroll by in the war room channel like a digital horror movie.
Deploy complete.
Hard refresh. Harder refresh. CMD+SHIFT+R refresh - the desperate kind.
Nothing changes. The bug lives on, like a zombie đ§ that wonât stay dead.
You step outside, gulping down air that suddenly feels too thick. Your phone is lighting up with messages from the support team. Each notification feels like another nail in your careerâs coffin.
Back at your desk, you dive into the dependency rabbit hole. console.log statements multiply like tribbles. Your code starts looking like a serial killerâs manifesto, with debugger statements everywhere. Two hours later, youâre three levels deep in the internal dependency chain, somewhere no application developer was meant to go.
Then you see it. Hidden in a utility function that has a try/catch clause, deep in your dependency chain. The function was validating input data before passing it through a series of processing functions - innocent-looking code that just transforms a massive data structure. The catch block had its own processing logic, presumably to format error messages before re-throwing.
But your error was different - completely different than what the catch clause expected. The error mapping code broke because it encountered an unhandled error shape, throwing a new error with a completely different payload. The upstream code was expecting errors of a particular structure, and when it got this mutated version instead, the whole system fell like silent dominoes. A simple Cannot read property of undefined had transformed into an unrecognizable monster by the time it reached your error handlers.
Somewhere in that try clause, a function that was not supposed to fail DID fail. The kind of function thatâs so fundamental, so basic, that no one even thinks to test for its failure. The type system promised it would work. The unit tests swore by it. The documentation claimed it was bulletproof.
The real kicker? The dependency had updated just an hour before your deployment, and it was very well unit tested. Like a cruel twist of fate, your feature walked right into its trap.
You fix the dependency version, verify the fix, and send out the all-clear signal at 10 PM. Your phone shows three missed calls from your friends at the Halloween party. Your Alien costume hangs on the door, judging you silently.
Mondayâs going to be fun explaining how a single undefined property brought down the system. Your mind wanders to your mortgage payments, your job security, and that one tweet about tech layoffs you saw last week.
As you finally shut down your laptop, you canât help but wonder: we have TypeScript, we have testing, we have code reviews - why is error handling still such a nightmare? Perhaps thatâs the real horror story.
Next time someone suggests a Friday deployment, youâll know better. Youâve seen what lurks in the shadows of the dependency tree, waiting to strike. Some monsters wear lab coats and carry clipboards, but the scariest ones? Undefined and error handling.
The End đ