Prologue

In the midpoint of my career's journey, I found myself within a codebase dark, For the straightforward path had been lost to me. Ah, how hard a thing it is to say What was this savage, and dense, and thorny legacy, Which in the very thought renews the fear! So bitter is it, death is little more; But of the good to treat, which there I found, Speak will I of the other things I saw there. I cannot well repeat how I entered it, So full was I of sleep at that point In which I had abandoned the true way.

But when I'd reached the foot of a server rack, which arose at the conclusion of that valley that had pierced my heart with so much dread, I looked aloft and saw its shoulders vested already with that Planet's rays which leadeth others right by every road. Then was the fear a little quieted.

My stack trace was a mess, my spirits low, my will to code had all but fled. And as I turned to flee back to the sunlit world of simple scripts and tutorials, a figure did appear before me. His form was faint, as if from long disuse of speech or presence.

When I saw him in that great desert, "Have pity on me," unto him I cried, "Whiche'er thou be, or shade or certain man!"^[1] He answered me: "Not man; man once I was. I lived in the age of monoliths and mainframes, when the gods of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were new. I was a programmer; I sang the logic of great systems." His voice was like the whir of an old fan, deep and resonant with dust.

"They call me the Sage. And I see you are lost. You cannot ascend this mountain of clean architecture directly. The path is guarded by the beasts of Scope Creep, Tight Deadlines, and Management Inertia. To find the path to Production at Peace, to the land of elegant design, you must first understand the nature of sin."

"And how?" I asked, my voice a trembling byte. "We must journey down," he said, his ghostly finger pointing to a fissure in the earth from which a faint glow of error logs emanated. "We must descend through every layer of abstraction, through every circle of damnation where bad code is punished. Only by seeing the consequences of every anti-pattern can you learn to avoid them."

And so, I followed him, my new guide, into the deep.