The Characters

Five people are at the center of the office and The Story. Every stage of every course belongs to exactly one of them. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental; every company simply ships with at least these characters by default. I didn't make the rules.

Filip

Senior developer, ~25 years in. Has personally committed every mistake at least twice, seen said mistakes repeated a handful of times across far too many projects, and carries that history with calm rather than superiority.

• Perpetually overloaded, so he delegates (which is why you most often get every task).
• Dry one-line rejection comments; a second line would be tech debt.
• Only cares about the codebase and its history; apparently not much else.

Luna

Senior developer, brilliant, ships like a freight train. Her solutions work, though at times they are load-bearing spaghetti: 47 commits titled wip, nine files, three concerns, delivered two days early.

• Warm, fast, and the only one who says "we" with sincerity.
• Always willing to offer a helping hand, even in areas where she has no experience.
• Dreams big, just like you.

Anton

Very junior, four monitors, infinite confidence. Has a "fix" for anything and everything within ninety seconds. Empty commits to feed the graph. Thinking for too long is expensive, CPU time is cheap. There is no problem that cannot be turned into two new ones.

• Never means any harm but is often the root cause of the problem.
• If git is known for remembering historical events, Anton is known for causing them.
• Genuinely your ally, which is what makes cleaning up after him affectionate rather than annoying.

Igor

Former CTO and/or programmer, gone before anyone arrived, perhaps still hired; accounts differ.

Igor exists only as commits: the initial commit of every repo, the deploy script nobody dares to touch, and commit messages with as much imagination as fix, final2, and revenge.

• The historical shadow figure.
• Has mitigated every possible problem at least three times but never actually fixed any of them.
• Code is not meant to be readable; it is meant to be run.

You interact with him through tools rather than dialogue: git log -S, git blame, git bisect. Every horrifying thing he did turns out, on close reading of the diff, to be working — but for all the wrong reasons.

The Boss

Nameless, faceless, never on screen, never quoted directly, only present via all-caps memos in INSTRUCTIONS.md.

• Judges the entire org by exactly one arbitrary metric, which can change at any moment.
• Sometimes has brilliant ideas; often far outside the scopes of the company.
• Values work over actual solutions.