Member-only story
The Developer Vigilante Rises
Inside the shadow world of developers who fix what nobody asked them to fix.
Three days remain until the delivery deadline, and a tangled code is throwing up roadblocks at every step. In the past, the development team would have thrown in the towel, delivering rushing or asking for more time. But that’s over. A mysterious developer fights against disorder in the margins of the product and removes the obstacles. In no time, the code returns to order and the developers deliver on time. While billing hours as ‘feature development’, they secretly execute their true mission: keeping the code up to date.
This story probably doesn’t sound familiar. We’re taught to follow the board, stick to our tickets, and comply with what we’re told. But sometimes, when the codebase is rotting and nobody wants to see it, a developer must become a vigilante and go beyond their assigned duty.
If it works, don’t touch it
It’s the cry heard across teams. A cry that paralyzes. A cry born of fear. If you enter certain parts of the code, you risk causing new and incomprehensible errors. If touched the wrong way, the consequences can be fatal. The important thing is that the code works now, with more or fewer bugs, and the priority is to create new features.
