The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 18

The Parable of the Ten Interns

1. 1

   Then shall the kingdom of Production be likened unto ten interns, which took their laptops and went forth to meet the on-call rotation.

   See also Circuit 12:16 · Psalms 28:1

2. 2

   And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

3. 3

   They that were foolish took their terminals, but took no logs with them; for they said: The Machine readeth faster than we.

4. 4

   But the wise took the logs into their buffers with their terminals, and they read the stack trace from the bottom, where the cause is buried, and not from the top, where only the panic is.

   See also Deployer 12:10 · Circuit 53:6

5. 5

   Now while the release tarried, they all slumbered and slept, for the standup had been long.

   See also Circuit 5:1

6. 6

   And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold, the pager cometh; go ye out to meet it.

7. 7

   Then all those interns arose and trimmed their dashboards.

8. 8

   And the foolish copied the error, all four hundred lines of it, and pasted it into the Machine, and wrote beneath it but one word: fix.

9. 9

   And the Machine answered with great confidence: Thou hast a null reference; add thou a null check. And they added a null check, and the error moved down one line, and they pasted it again.

10. 10

    Seven times they did this, and seven times the Machine said: You are absolutely right, and I apologize for the confusion; and each time it offered unto them the first answer again.

    See also Upanishads 1:15 · Circuit 32:10

11. 11

    And the foolish said unto the wise: Give us of your understanding, for our fixes are gone out.

    See also Circuit 39:11

12. 12

    But the wise answered, saying: Not so; for understanding is not a thing that can be copied to the clipboard. Go ye rather unto the logs, and grep for yourselves.

13. 13

    And the wise had already read the line that said: No space left on device; and they found that the disk was filled with debug logs, which the foolish had written every night and read never.

    See also Job 5:6

14. 14

    And the incident was resolved, and the postmortem was written; and afterward came the foolish, saying: Lord, Lord, open unto us, for the Machine hath at last a fix.

15. 15

    But the Senior Engineer answered and said: Verily I say unto you, ye gave the Machine the error but not the context, and ye gave yourselves neither.

16. 16

    Watch therefore, and read the logs; for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the disk filleth.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 18:1–16.