In the wild world of FinTech startup life, Tyler had one rule: if the code works, it’s good code. He called it “pragmatic coding.” His boss called it “a series of questionable quick hacks.”
It started with a simple API integration that just wasn’t cooperating. Tyler’s solution? A script that refreshed the page every 0.3 seconds until the data appeared. It worked like a charm… until they hit production, and the server bill spiked like an angry teenager’s energy drink bill.
Tyler’s team was always under pressure. Deadlines moved faster than his debugger. So, his hacks began to evolve, like bizarre Pokémon of technical debt. Need a search function? Tyler quickly rigged a workaround that just scanned for the word “search” on the page, then redirected the user to Google. The customers loved it—right up until someone typed “search refund” and got the Wikipedia page for “buyer’s remorse” instead.
By mid-quarter, Tyler had assembled a patchwork quilt of hastily slapped-together hacks that made the entire codebase seem held together with virtual chewing gum and rubber bands. His crowning achievement, though, was the Great Loop Hack. To save time, he wrote a single giant loop to handle everything: payments, refunds, login sessions, password resets… all cycling through one mega-loop. He called it “Tyler’s Loop.” The team called it “The Loop of Doom.”
One day, in the middle of a client demo, something unexpected happened. The Loop of Doom triggered an infinite loop, locking everyone out of the system—including Tyler. They spent the next hour stuck in the meeting room, waiting for the code to break itself so they could log in again.
But the worst was the time-travel bug. One of Tyler’s hacks rewired the system clock to refresh whenever it encountered an error, which worked until the company’s payroll system suddenly showed everyone working negative hours. In a glorious display of irony, Tyler’s attempt to fix his mistake was to make the clock run backwards, claiming it would “cancel out the glitch.” For a brief period, it looked like they’d solved the problem—until HR noticed that it looked like employees hadn’t worked since 1972.
Finally, Tyler’s boss called him in. “Tyler,” he said, eyes fixed on the floor, “a CPU is just a rock we tricked into thinking. And we’re pushing our rock over a cliff.”
Tyler nodded, brimming with confidence. “So… we just need another rock?”