Introducing Ian “Merge” Mendiola

My name is Ian ‘Merge’ Mendiola, and I’m a Software Developer co-op here at Rypple. I’m currently enrolled in the Software Engineering program at the University of Waterloo, and about to complete my last term (go me!). If you noticed above, I introduced myself as ‘Merge’ Mendiola. Merge is in fact my nickname here at Rypple, and I’m about to tell you why.

The whole team was working hard driving toward our 30-day goal of totally redesigning the application in time for Daniel Debow and David Stein demo at HR-Tech. We were implementing the finishing touches before the big push. Two Rypple veterans, James and Austin Tam (no they are not brothers), and I were sailing toward ‘All Nighter Island’.

It was 8:00 AM, and we had been up all night debugging, tweaking, re-factoring and duplicating code. Totally sleep deprived, I found a “bed” in the storage room and got some shut eye on a layer of premium card board boxes. I woke up just in time for our daily stand-up meeting, totally prepared to work another 8 hours (gotta love the start-up life!). By the end of the day I was so tired I could barely process anything. I was ready to go home, but first I had to check-in the CSS tweaks I made during the day. To do so, I had to update SVN. It updated and then MERGED the file feedback.css. Cool, no conflicts right? I trusted that the green text that the merged file was written in meant it had to be okay (it’s in green!)

I went home in a daze and slept. That same night, I decided to check out Rypple. I started exploring the site and came across the registration page. To my surprise it was totally messed up, text boxes were floating in weird spots, and text was misaligned. I proceeded to check out the subversion logs and ran svn blame on feedback.css.  I started to see that all the changes to the registration styles in feedback.css had my name next to it. And then I remembered trusting the green text when feedback.css was MERGED. I began frantically sending out an email to all the developers and we managed to fix it just in time for the HR-tech demo.

The jokes about my slip up began rolling out. I have never heard so many jokes about merging in my life. I was officially dubbed “Merge” in an email thanking the team for all our hard work. The email gracefully said, “Special thanks go to: …Ian “Merge” Mendiola for stepping up and for stopping only for a brief moment of drooling on a cardboard box”.

If you stuck through the story, there are two things I want you to get out of it: First, never commit changes the day after an all nighter, your head is never in the right place, and two, only at Rypple are the developers cool enough that even after messing up, they still give you commit privileges.