The reports had been on reddit, Hacker News and stackoverflow all day, though she hadn't paid much attention to them. Some crazy programmer had escaped from the state asylum. They were calling him the XML Man since he had lost his right arm and had it replaced with what looked like an XML document but wasn't. He was a killer, and everyone in the region was warned to keep watch and report anything suspicious. But this didn't interest her. She was more worried about an upcoming code review.
After several consultation calls with other engineers in her department, she chose the editor she was most experienced with and was ready and waiting at her desk when her pair programmer came to attend a meeting. They went to a code design meeting with another team, then dropped them off and opened their laptops to continue to work on the current sprint. They took turns writing code for a while to the sound of nerdcore streaming from rdio and pandora.
Then an email arrived that repeated the warning she had heard that afternoon. An insane killer with an XML document in place of his right hand was loose in on the system. Suddenly, the dark, moonless night didn't seem to encourage a programming mindset to her. The network they were on was secluded and didn't have high speed internet access. A perfect spot for a deranged mad-man to lurk, she thought, saving the file she was editing.
"Maybe we should get out of here," she said. "That XML Man sounds dangerous."
"Awe, c'mon, it's nothing," her coworker said, trying to get in another commit. She submitted the code they had been writing for review.
"No, really. We're all alone out here. I'm scared," she said.
They argued for a moment. Then they lost connection to the wifi network, as if something…or someone…had restarted the access point. She closed her laptop and said: "Let's out of here now!"
"Jeeze," her coworker said in disgust, but he committed to his local repository and closed his laptop.
They left in stony silence, and when they found another working access point, he refused to tell her the password. He was being so unreasonable, she fumed to herself. She tethered her phone indignantly and started checking her email. Having received nothing new, she slammed her laptop shut as hard as she could. And then she screamed, throwing her laptop into the air.
Her coworker leapt up and grabbed it before it smashed into the floor. "What is it? What's wrong?" he shouted. He opened her laptop and he saw it. A terribly formatted, bloody XML document was being displayed in a terminal window.
I inherited this code once upon a time and had to make it work.
My involvement with this code is best shared around a campfire told in the style of a scary story.
This is an Apache 1.3 module that takes a document that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike XML and does something with it to make records appear in an HP9000 mainframe system for mailorder warehouse management.
Never do what this code does.
This repo is meant to serve as a warning to good developers everywhere.