The Night Before Code Freeze
Tags: devops, sre, ops
Published: 2019-12-06 06:55:53

---
title: The Night Before Code Freeze
published: true
description: A new twist on a classic holiday poem with cartoon lemurs and fun to match 
tags: devops, sre, ops
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/bcfe5q578vvt3dpf5yio.png
---

# Introduction

![The Night Before Code Freeze - Title image](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/bcfe5q578vvt3dpf5yio.png)

This is a lovely little poem I illustrated for the sake of a few holiday presentations. There are videos of this talk which will come out later, but for now, as with all of my talks I'll be posting this storybook edition.

This involved 35 hours of artwork, lyrics, and 15 unique illustrations. As always it's quite a bit of fun and I can post a "How it's Made" later if there's interest.

Now then, shall we get started?

# The Night Before Code Freeze

![Lemurs at the office. Escher cat seems to have found a wrecking ball, that can't be good.](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/qr66ia1brnlagz4gd3br.png)

'Twas the night before Code Freeze, when all thro'out git,
Not a developer was coding, not even a commit;

----

![Lemurs seeing Ship It Squirrel approve their changes. That means they all pass right?](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/2q637zgqbt1odrvqr2lo.png)

The pull requests were submitted to the repo with care,
In hopes that Ship It Squirrel would soon be there

----

![Lemurs at the table discussing things, Indigo sneaks in with Escher Cat](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/pzfn2v9zte65oezmcvb2.png)

The team was nestled all snug at their table
With visions of green tests and builds that were stable
And manager in their buttondowns, and I in my flannel
Had just settled our brains after a long planning panel

----

![Red the Lemur's pager going off on their phone. Oof, I know I've had that experience before, looks frightning](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/vp307jbmmknr83e9avj8.png)

When out of the pager there arose such a clatter
We sprang to our laptops to see what was the matter
Away to the logs we flew like a flash,
Tore open cold storage, and booted up bash

----

![Red the Lemur panicking in front of monitors and charts, things are on fire](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/4sjoo4rdetckf7pdongh.png)

The lines on the graph of the new made request
Gave the lustre of working systems to a build which was blessed
When, what to our wondering inspections should appear,
But a ream of 500s, and outages in our hemisphere

----

![Red the Lemur trying to put the fire out while yelling](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/wb5u87o6pxj10m4ueiy1.png)

With a little debugging, so lively and quick
I knew in a moment the systems would brick
More rapid than black Friday the errors they came,
And we looked, and we shouted, and call'd them by name:

----

![The lemurs group up to put out the fire, Indigo and Escher cat are on a fire truck. Wait, how did they get one of those!?](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/k89h3tqgqbetqllourv1.png)

Now! DDoS, now! Overflow, now! Injection, and Cross Site
On! SecOps, on! Blue Team! Triage and Rewrite;
To the bottom of things! To the page and on-call
Now fix away! fix away! fix away all!

----

![Indigo has duct tape and Escher Cat has car jumpers. Y'know I'm getting really worried about this.](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/9se29wdpru6k70cws28e.png)

As new patches to the outages they try,
When they meet with an error, a fix is found by and by
So out to the war-room the on-calls they flew,
With the PRs full of fixes - and the Incident Lead too:

----

![Red and Chartreuse are celebrating with Escher Cat](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/a0a9aieengckge79vsl3.png)

And then in a twinkling, I heard on slack
The dancing and laughing of as we beat the hack
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down to Incident Review the Tech Lead came with a bound:

----

![The tech lead, Scarlet, explains all the fixes](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/yhd2pv2fr2rd0lua2pst.png)

They were excited about metrics, from their charts to their throughput,
And their servers were all patched with a quick chroot
A bundle of fixes were right on track,
And they look'd like a new developer opening their very first Mac:

Their eyes - how they twinkled! Their postmortems told the tale,
Their notes were thorough, they showed us its scale;
The major details were drawn up in a chart,
As well as some sketchnotes we could only call art,

----

![Scarlet explains how the fixes will work, pointing at a globe](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/whukhyfi8z4nw5t39acr.png)

A fresh latte they held up to their lip
As they exclaimed how the fixes would soon ship
They had a broad smile, and a plan they thought best
That would mitigate the problem in the East and the West.

----

![Scarlet tells the others not to change a thing while smiling. Indigo is worried as she brings out the magic code freeze crystal. Can I have a magic code freeze crystal? I could sure use one of those](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/5is68wtftdzcf6mqqhsa.png)

They were excited and eager, a right jolly Tech Lead
Until they reminded us and made sure we agreed;
A look of their eyes and a twist of their smile
Let me know to not change a thing, not even a file

----

![Scarlet freezing all deployments because magic. Magic is a great plot device, but to be fair we're talking programming lemurs so perfectly fair game by this point.](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/yvml5v15mhpyet9t6khb.png)

They spoke not a word but went straight to their work
And filed the report, then turn'd with a smirk,
And laying their finger aside of their nose,
And giving a nod, the deployments now froze

----

![The lemurs are all waving goodbye, Escher and Indigo are upside down for some reason, and there's a strange picture of cartoon foxes in the background and some HTTP status codes because the writer likes references and jokes like this ALT text](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ja3p1xt8ba7dlluj2yi3.png)

They walked to the elevator, to their team gave a call,
And away they all went, it was time for withdrawl
But I heard them exclaim, ere they drove out of sight-

Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night.