Oh woe is me, a coder out of luck;
my every script ignites the moment struck.
This logic—scaffolds that I raised in rain—
collapses, whispering softly, "Run again."
My variables elope and shed their names,
then hide in nested scopes like shifting frames.
The linter keeps its vigil by my screen,
and counts my every sin in red and green.
I called a function hope()—it returned null;
the promise I awaited rang back dull.
I push to prod; prod pushes back, bemused—
its stack trace sighs, "Assertion: you're confused."
A segmentation fault inside my chest;
the core dumps every dream. "Go get some rest."
The rubber duck, my priest, absorbs my fears;
I murmur edge-cases that no other hears.
Behold the pyre: the file marked final, dead,
its commit log a rosary of "fix";
the pipeline flickers green, then back to red,
a candle guttering through frantic ticks.
Exceptions drift like candles down a stream;
we catch them all, yet still they find a seam.
My teammates nod with grave, undertaking grace,
estimating coffins, case by patient case.
The backlog drinks my hours with a gentle slurp;
scope creep slips past the door without a chirp;
and still I type, indenting grief with grace—
a try/except around what won't erase.
If mercy compiles somewhere near the dawn,
I'll ship the patch; if not, I'll debug on.
For even when the dark refutes my art,
I'll git commit, and branch it from my heart.
A meditation on the developer's journey through digital purgatory