Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
On Thursday morning a product manager sends a waspish message to the dashboard Slack channel, saying that they’re trying to pull a report but only getting a blank page that reads:
IndexError—please provide a valid index
All the guys are either busy or absent, so I decide to take a look for myself. If I can’t figure out how to fix it, my logic is that if I can at least try and find where the problem is, I can quietly nudge my curly-haired champion John to fix it when he’s off his call.
I log in and start to comb for the reports, looking for the function I need.
The odds of me fixing the broken report are low.
The odds of me crashing the entire dashboard with an errant keystroke are a lot higher, but luckily I have enormous experience in this field—I have been haunting my sister’s socials for years, careful to leave no trace.
After several minutes of scrolling, I think I might be in the right place but am no wiser as to what the problem is, and am just about to give up, when a line of code catches my eye.
Brian the Dinosaur is with me in this moment, whispering, is the index out of range? It is. It is out of range!
I can actually fix this. Holy shit!
I tweak the code, switching it from (my_list[5]) to (my_list[4]), hit save, then refresh the dashboard. The error is gone.
I am—no exaggeration—a fucking genius. My chest swells. I flap my hands like a baby duck hitting the water for the first time. I am high on life, with absolutely no one to share it with.
—
John is the first one to reappear, and I pounce immediately. “GUESS what.”
He deposits his computer back on his desk. “What? No wait, I want to guess. OK,” he muses. “You…just found out you’re the lost princess of a small European country.”
“Be serious.”
“You saw a ghost and it tried to speak to you.”
“Where do you even come up with these? No.”
“OK, tell me.”
I can’t contain my excitement. “I fixed a line of code!”
He blinks. “I’m going to need more information.”
“One of the product managers was grousing they kept getting an index error when they tried to pull a report. So I went in to look, and I fixed it!”
John leans forward and gives me a high five across the desks. “That is awesome. What was the fix?”
“It was out of range!”
The enthusiasm I’m feeling about this is not normal. Next I’ll be learning chess.
John is pleased. “Four weeks in DatStrat and you’re already one of us. Now all you need is a cool pair of glasses.”
—
Connor returns from whatever long, drawn-out meeting he’s been in, looking particularly harassed. I watch as he logs back into his desktop, checks his inbox, sighs deeply, closes it, then checks the Slack channel and starts scrolling.
I see the moment he reads the message about the report error, and then my reply. He turns toward me, eyebrow raised.
“What’s this?” he asks, pointing at the screen.
I don’t even bother to pretend I haven’t been watching his every move. “All taken care of. I figured it out.”
“Did John fix it for you?” He’s almost petulant when he says this, like the only person I should be asking to fix things is him.
“No. I did it myself. It was easy.”
“It was easy,” he repeats, unconvinced.
“It was no big deal, just a small fix. The index was out of range.”
“How do you know what that is?”
I shrug, showing him how breezy and nonchalant I am. “I’ve been working through a few levels on DinoCode. I knew what to do.”
The hours I’ve spent secretly playing a children’s coding game have all been leading up to this. And I can tell you it was one hundred percent worth it. Connor is completely, utterly speechless. I feel like I could take over the world.
When he finally speaks again, his voice is kind of squeaky, like he’s straining every muscle he has not to react. “You’ve been doing DinoCode?”
“Yes.”
He does laugh now.
“That is…” He trails off, scratching at the back of his neck. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Nothing. That’s great, Annie. Well done.” His voice is like a warm hug.
He’s still chuckling minutes later, when Ben reappears. “What’s funny?” Ben asks.
“Annie’s been doing DinoCode.”
Ben freezes, then says, “Annie’s…been doing…DinoCode?”
“Yes,” Connor says, his smile huge.
I look from one to the other, suspicion flaring. “What’s so weird about that?”
“Nothing,” Ben says hastily. “Absolutely nothing. That’s cool. DinoCode is sweet.”
I get the feeling I’m missing something, but none of the guys say anything, and they’re all suddenly very focused on their work, and my calendar pings with a call reminder, so the moment is gone.
—
I don’t see the guys for the rest of the afternoon, until we’re all due to sit in on a weekly stand-up meeting with Software Engineering.
Stand-ups are one of the stupider customs of the tech industry, designed to be an informal team meeting where people share what they’re working on, and they do it—you guessed it—standing up.
Except, no one ever bothers standing, making a stand-up meeting just…a meeting. While I’m at it, no one in Software Engineering is an actual engineer, either. Rather, it’s just a team full of developers who use—get ready to die—an “engineering approach.”
You can see why I love it here.
Sven, the department head, is a highly respected yet temperamental Swede with hair so blond that when I first met him I genuinely thought it came from a bottle.
Shannon would die if she realized the color she spends hundreds of dollars a month to maintain is simply growing out of this man’s head naturally.
He is exactly what you’d expect from the head of software engineering: technical, smart, efficient—and scary, with no people skills.
That last part is something I’ve only ever dared say out loud to Connor, who laughed and said, “He’s a really good guy.
” I never did figure out if this was because of his lack of people skills, or in spite of them. I may never know.
I catch up with the rest of DatStrat (Martin’s shorthand has infected my brain) as they’re hanging around by the elevators, deep in animated discussion.
“No way,” Ben says, throwing his whole body into it, like a human slingshot. “Nothing tops the pistachio.”
“That’s insane,” Martin parries back. “White chocolate is the original. The classic!”
“It’s too much,” Ben insists. “That’s way too much for a cookie.”
“Only you would like a savory cookie.”
“We have to stop this,” John groans, clutching his stomach. “I’m getting too hungry. I want them so bad I’d go and line up for them.”
“Insanity,” Connor says. “No cookie is worth the hassle.”
“What’s insane is you saying that,” Ben says, as if Connor’s words go completely beyond the pale.
“What are you guys talking about?” I interrupt as I come to a halt beside them.
Connor grins. “Krumes.”
“Who now?”
Martin boggles. “The bakehouse.”
I shake my head. “No idea.”
This sets them all off immediately. Martin mimes the sound of a bomb exploding, while the other three pile into the elevator with exclamations of what do you mean and best cookies in the world and have you been living under a rock?!
Apparently, yes I have.
Anyway, the stand-up is uneventful: it turns out Sven likes Connor a lot, and the two of them get into a sort of heated brainstorm about whether he can help Engineering do something that’s frankly way above my pay grade and therefore too boring to listen to.
Blah blah data pipeline blah blah machine learning blah blah API. You get the idea.
“Anything to add, Annie?” Connor asks just before the meeting wraps up.
I glance up quickly; I’m a rabbit caught in a snare. Connor is watching me with what I can only describe as an extremely reprehensible twinkle. The man has an instinct for the second I tune out of the conversation. He always, always knows.
I’ve spent the last five minutes doodling a picture of a small castle into the corner of my notebook. Obviously, I have absolutely nothing to add here.
“I’m going to take some time,” I say, adopting the air of a great thinker. “Really process what we’ve been discussing here. Before I give my opinion.”
Sven seems satisfied with that. The meeting adjourns.
“Dickhead,” I murmur, as we file out of the room.
Connor only grins. “It seemed like you were working on something pretty full-on over there.”
“I was taking notes,” I say loftily.
“Were you? That’s great,” he says. “You can send the meeting recap across to everyone.”
I smack him on the arm with my notebook and continue walking.
—
“What did you think of that ask from the customer services team?” I ask Connor when we’re back at our desks.
He’s already tucked into a pack of Skittles. He keeps them on him at all times. “I think it won’t work.”
“Even if we just imported the data? They say they can get it.”
“Even then,” he says.
“I think you’re wrong.”
“Why does that not surprise me, Annabelle?”
“Would it really be that hard?”
“I get it,” he says, smiling. “You fix one line of code and now you’re ready to build a whole dashboard.”
“You’d be surprised how much they teach you in DinoCode.”
“I promise you I wouldn’t.”
“I bet I could do it.”
“I bet you could not,” he says, adding, “and before you go all fire-breather on me, not because you can’t do it. Because it can’t be done.”
“A wager then,” I tell him.
“What are we wagering?” John asks.
“Annie thinks she can import the third-party reviews data to make the report CS is asking for.”
John says nothing but when he looks at me his face clearly states: why would you think that?
“And I think it’s not possible,” Connor says. “Which has instantly made her certain that it is possible, and now she wants to bet on it.”
I stick to my guns. “Martin will agree with me. Martin, don’t you think if we did the same thing as with that other app from last week it could work? It’s not that different, surely.”
“Umm,” Martin says, leaning back in his chair. “Um um um um. Maybe. Maybe.”
“See,” I say to Connor, spreading my hands. “Martin agrees with me.”
“Would we call that Martin agreeing with you?”
“Are you scared, Connor? Afraid a girl is going to show you up in front of all your little friends?”
“Your trash talk is truly something to behold,” he tells me. “Are these guys my little friends?”
“Take the bet,” Ben says. “What’s the prize? Better yet, what’s the forfeit?”
“Good question,” I reply, thinking quickly. “If I win, Connor has to be my assistant for a week.”
He laughs. “It’s disturbing how quickly you had that ready to go.”
“And if I’m wrong,” I say, “which I won’t be…”
“If she’s wrong, Annie has to go and get us all Krumes for the stand-up on Monday morning,” Ben says.
John leaps up from his chair, punching the air. “Yes!”
“Fine. If I can’t do it, I will go line up at your little cookie emporium on the weekend.”
Connor looks me over, thoughtful. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life. I figure this out, and you have to do everything I tell you.”
“In twenty-four hours,” Connor verifies.
“In twenty-four hours,” I agree. “But I’m allowed to ask the guys for help.”
“Sorry, Annie,” Martin interjects. “I’m rooting against you now. I really love Krumes.”
“Fine.” Connor nods, then holds his hand out for me to shake. “You can ask for help. In twenty-four hours, if you haven’t figured out how to integrate the data, you’re waiting in the insane bakery line. I hope you don’t have plans this weekend.”
“It won’t matter,” I say, taking his hand. It’s warm. “I am going to win.”