0 HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TIME IT IS.
There are no win-
dows in this office and no clock, only the blinking red
LED display of a microwave, which flashes 12:00, 12:00,
12:00, 12:00. Joel and 1 have been programming for days.
We have a bug, a stubborn demon of a bug. So the red
pulse no-time feels right, like a read-out of our brains,
which have somehow synchronized themselves at the
same blink rate.
"But what if they select all the text and-"
" - hit Delete."
"Damn! The NULL case!"
"And if not we're out of the text field and they hit
space-"
"-yeah, like for-"
"-no parameter-"
"Hell!"
"So what if we space-pad?"
"I don't know .... Wait a minute!"
"Yeah, we could space-pad-"CLOSE TO THE MACHINE
"-and do space as numeric."
"Yes! We'll call SendKey(space) to-?
"-the numeric object."
"My God! That fixes it!"
"Yeah! That'll work if-"
"-space is numeric!"
"-if space is numeric!"
We lock eyes. We barely breathe. For a slim moment,
we are together in a universe where two human beings
can simultaneously understand the statement "if space is
numeric!"
Joel and I started this round of debugging on Friday
morning. Sometime later, maybe Friday night, another
programmer, Danny, came to work. I suppose it must be
Sunday by now because it's been a while since we've seen
my client's employees around the office. Along the way, at
odd times of day or night that have completely escaped us,
we've ordered in three meals of Chinese food, eaten six
large pizzas, consumed several beers, had innumerable
bottles of fizzy water, and finished two entire bottles of
wine. It has occurred to me that if people really knew
how software got written, I'm not sure if they'd give their
money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.
What are we working on? An artificial intelligence
project to find "subversive" talk over international phone
lines? Software for the second start-up of a Silicon Valley
executive banished from his first company? A system to
help AIDS patients get services across a city? The details
escape me just now. We may be helping poor sick people

or tuning a set oflow-Ievel routines to verify bits on a dis-
tributed database protocol- I don't care. I should care; in
another part of my being-later, perhaps when we
emerge from this room full of computers- I will care
very much why and for whom and for what purpose I am
writing software. But just now: no. I have passed through
a membrane where the real world and its uses no longer
matter. I am a software engineer, an independent contrac-
tor working for a department of a city government. I've
hired Joel and three other programmers to work with me.
Down the hall is Danny, a slim guy in wire-rimmed
glasses who comes to work with a big, wire-haired dog.
Across the bay in his converted backyard shed is Mark,
who works on the database. Somewhere, probably asleep
by now, is Bill the network guy. Right now, there are only
two things in the universe that matter to us. One, we have
some bad bugs to fix . Two, we're supposed to install the
system on Monday, which I think is tomorrow.
"Oh, no, no!" moans Joel, who is slumped over his
keyboard. "No-o-o-o." It comes out in a long wail. It has
the sound of lost love, lifetime regret . W.......