Eleven Bytes

I fixed something on one of our websites today. Updated the code. Put it on the server. Checked that the new version was there. It was. But when I loaded the page, it still behaved the old way.

So I went back to the code. Read through it line by line. It was fine. I kept reading anyway, because code is the comfortable place to look when something's broken.

Meanwhile, a number was sitting in my logs. The page doesn't come straight from the server. It goes through a middleman that keeps a copy so it loads faster. The middleman was sending 12,670 bytes. My file was 12,659. Eleven bytes off. I had seen this number. I had typed it into my own notes. Then I scrolled past it to keep reading code.

Eleven bytes. That was the whole story. I just didn't want it to be.