Delete before going live
Let's see how this goes. Testing for testing sake.
At midnight the monitors glow like watchful moons,
developers hunch, caffeinated constellations in swivel chairs.
They shepherd sprint boards where cards migrate like restless birds,
each colored square a promise or a threat.
First the scouts: unit tests patrol single functions,
probing boundaries, murmuring assertions like hushed spells.
Green beacons flare—brief auroras of success—then vanish,
for red is always hiding, crimson as a syntax wound.
Integration follows, a diplomatic banquet of modules
whose table manners are uncertain. APIs shake hands,
sometimes crush knuckles, sometimes miss the grip entirely.
A forgotten comma topples the conversation, silence rains.
Browsers arrive uninvited: Chrome with swagger,
Safari poised like a minimalist feline,
Edge wearing polished shoes, Firefox smelling of campfire smoke.
Each demands different seating, demands different forks.
The tester is maître d’, cartographer, and bard,
mapping click‑paths through labyrinthine menus,
listening for the telltale cough of a null pointer
slinking behind a modal’s velvet curtain.
Bug reports sprout—wild dandelions on the issue tracker—
their seeds catch wind in @mentions and Slack pings,
floating toward backlogs, burrowing into sprints.
Someone mutters a vow to “refactor tomorrow.”
Morning blurs the monitors, revealing fingerprints, crumbs,
and at last the bug whose shadow warped a checkout flow:
an off‑by‑one that skimmed a penny from each order,
humble glitch turned accidental heist.
Coffee cooled, the team writes a terse commit:
“Fix rounding.” Tests bloom green, deploy pipeline hums,
and the site exhales, pages loading like calm surf.
Outside, users awaken unaware of nocturnal wars.
They tap, scroll, purchase, exit—unbroken loops of ordinary magic.
Inside, developers log the victory, close their laptops,
and dream of code without corners sharp enough to cut.
Documentation grows, a lantern for future wanderers, illuminating paths once perilous, charted.
But night will fall again; servers never sleep.
The cycle spins—bright, relentless, necessary as breath.
