On Friday morning, we had lectures. The room was empty after the lecture, so we held a short team meeting. I suggested they come over to my place and work the whole weekend. We’d work as soon as we wake up and order food so we’d have all the time to make the game. Around four p.m., everyone would come with backpacks and clothes for three days.
At one p.m., I walked with Boyana. She’s traveling home today at four and won’t be here for the weekend. I had time to go to the city center to buy her a helium balloon. There wasn’t much to choose from, so I got one with a picture of a princess, I liked the color.
Boyana was happy with the balloon and asked how I knew she liked princess themed things. Princesses remind her of childhood.
“Did I ever tell you?”
“I didn’t know, it just happened that way.”
I called her “princess” during the walk. We walked along the quay, not entering the neighborhoods. During our conversation, I openly showed that I wanted us to be together. I had never been so open before, and I didn’t feel any internal hesitation to act this way. I told her I kept thinking about meeting her again. I spoke about it as if retelling a movie, just casually. She said I was young and that it would be great if I were twenty-nine. We passed by a graffiti written in red spray paint on the pavement. It said, “Come on, Princess!”
“See, the writer of this graffiti has the same problem as I do.”
She smiled, and it was clear how much she enjoyed everything that was happening, and that the graffiti fit so well into the context. I had seen that graffiti before, but I’d always forgotten about it. But today, in this story, it appeared as though I had written it myself.
We walked in silence for a minute. Then she told me that her family is moving to Italy this summer, and that she has a boyfriend in Sombor. She still doesn’t know if she’ll go to Italy or stay here, so she hadn’t mentioned it and allowed us to spend so much time together over the past few weeks. But now she was speaking honestly about it, and in the end, she said that she wanted to keep seeing me and enjoy our time together, but she didn’t know if she’d stay in Novi Sad. She added that staying here, because of someone she met recently, would be a small scandal and definitely something unusual, but maybe that could be overcome somehow.
This was now much more complicated than I thought. The conversation was still relaxed. With Boyana, it was easy to talk openly about anything.
Three hours passed, and we were still on the quay. We ran to her apartment and called a taxi to get her to the station on time. She told me to promise I’d think about her over the weekend before getting into the taxi.
I rushed home to meet the team. I changed the bed linen in my room, as Elena would sleep there, the three of us would sleep in the living room, Ian and Maxim on the stretched sofa, and I’d sleep on the floor like a true host. We planned to work until two or three a.m., and on Saturday we’d continue as soon as we wake up.
Intensive work lasted until Sunday afternoon, we were exhausted and our concentration was slipping. When I lay down to sleep and closed my eyes, I saw the tanks and other units moving, just like I had seen comments in a CM earlier, when I closed my eyes. Maxim was the first to suggest that we stop.
“This doesn’t make sense anymore. We’ve done enough. It’s time to stop.”
Ian agreed that it should stop soon.
“Everything planned for this weekend is done. I only noticed that money can go into minus when building buildings. You can always make a building. If there’s no money, the funds go into minus. So, when making a building, there’s no check if there’s enough money for it.”
I was in charge of that option, and I knew it worked.
“Wait, it worked, unless we did something else and broke it. I’m clicking again, it doesn’t work without money.”
“I’m clicking too, and it works for me, Ian insisted.”
“It works on my machine.”
Ian came over to check that it worked on my machine, then he got into it to figure out why it worked on one and not the other. We were all already up, walking around the apartment to rest from sitting all day.
My thoughts went back to the walk with Boyana. I didn’t expect to find myself in this situation. I don’t want to stop seeing her, and it seems like she doesn’t want that either. We’re stuck in this situation. There’s no way I can distance myself from her; I need to see her. I’m thinking about trying to be friends with her, but I don’t know if that’s possible. Very difficult.
After about ten minutes, Ian found the problem.
“We didn’t do something right with the version control of the code, or this software has a bug, because the code isn’t the same on all our computers.”
We waited for him to suggest something.
“There’s an option to merge the codes in the repository and then we all download the code again.”
“Could that cause a problem?”
“There’s a small chance, but it’s most likely that there won’t be any problems.”
“Okay, then. We’ll fix it if anything goes wrong. We can’t leave it like this, with different codes on each machine.”
“All right, here we go…”
