You don’t sleep that night. Your body screams for it. But you don’t sleep. You didn’t give in last night; you won’t give in today. Sleep can wait. Your code has crashed. The software is crashing. And you don’t know why.

You have checked the logs and pored through the traces. You have read the code. You have done it all. Again, and again. But the answer eludes you. You know you are close. You know it’s there. You can feel it. It’s hiding somewhere in those ten lines of code, everything points to. But you don’t see it.

You know the end is coming. You try something. It fails. You try something else. It fails even more miserably. “I just want to make it better”, you shout as you throw one last thing at it. It fails. You let out a scream of anguish. That’s it. You have nothing else left. It is time to accept defeat. You stand up tired and defeated, and you walk away.

But it holds you back. You don’t know what it is, but it refuses to let go. You stand there looking back at the screen. And that’s when it hits you. It’s a whisper of a thought. But you grasp at it. You know you are grasping for straws now. But it’s all you have. “Can it be that simple”, you ask yourself.

The unseen force pulls you back to the chair and you start typing. With trembling fingers, you rewrite the code. “Why didn’t I see this before.” But this is not the time for that. It is time to write. You keep coding.

Before you know it, you are testing it. You start with something easy. It holds. It doesn’t crash. You release the breath you didn’t even know you were holding. You test again, a bit more difficult this time. It stands.

You are growing bolder. You reach for the moon. You throw the most difficult test case at it. “Stop!”, you scream, “It is too soon.” But the die is cast, and all you can do is watch it roll. You glare at that cursor. It blinks. You don’t. You wait for the axe to fall. But it doesn’t fall. It stands strong. It stands fast. The software works. It continues to work.

You look out of the window. The sun has risen, and the world is coming to life. You take a deep breath and the smell of spring comes rushing in. Winter never smelled like spring before. The birds are chirping and the air is full of hope. Hope of a bright future.

“I did it. I fixed it. This is why, this is why I became a programmer”, you tell yourself as your head hits the desk. You sleep. You have never slept better.