It took me a while to “complete” the site. As we all know, a lot of these things are never done. I’ve updated it considerably since it was “finished”, but I always knew that would be the case, as the site was meant to grow with me. Anyway, at some point, I was updating projects on the site, and during testing, I found that the link to my build week 1 project no longer worked. The copy in my personal GitHub account worked, but the one in the team’s organization account didn’t. Neither did the links on my page that went to other teammates’ websites. I chalked it up to internet issues and went about my way, not giving it another thought.

Spider-sense tingling

A week or two passed, and someone from my first build week team asked a question in the team’s Slack channel: “Hey folks, anyone know where our potluck repos went?”

This was followed by someone else answering, “I was wondering that too,” and other members of the team confirming that their repositories had also vanished. The person who brought it up was especially concerned, because he was one of the senior React developers and reproducing that work to show to potential employers would be difficult. One of the junior React devs added our TL to the channel, as he had left when build week was over.

I wasn’t as impacted as the React people, because I had a copy of my project on my personal GitHub. It was what I had primarily worked from, and I had been copying my code up from there to the organization’s repositories. I felt a lot of concern for the team though, especially the React people, who would have had a much more difficult time than a website developer if the project had to be redone.

I did some research and found that GitHub repositories don’t just vanish for no reason. There’s a deletion process involved. GitHub also permanently removes deleted data after 90 days, so our work might still be recoverable. I asked my regular group if anything like this had even happened to them, and no one had heard of it before. One of them offered a link that might help to recover the repositories.

The fact that the organization had disappeared also sat unsteadily with me for another reason. As I had said in my initial account of build week, one of our team members had done this project for his first build week. He shared a link with the unit 1 students who were building websites to market the project. It was to a marketing site from a repository that had been built by one of the unit 1 students from his old organization. It was therefore about a month old and had not mysteriously disappeared.

The trail leads to…

I confirmed that the build week organization itself was no longer in my teammate’s GitHub profiles, because it was missing from mine. This meant, of course, that the organization had been deleted, and with it, all of the repositories that it contained. The repositories, for those of you unfamiliar with GitHub, contain all of the work that our team did. We each had a repository (or, “repo”) with our code, and when it was ready, we could merge our code with the project’s master code, which was the essence of the group project and the whole point of build week. Only someone with administrative access to the account could delete a repo. Of course, you all know where this is going. Conflicts at work… no one else was asking the question, so I did it.

Until now, our TL had been silent. I specifically called him out by “atting” him, which, in Slack is a message that tags someone. I asked him, “Do you know what’s going on here? Did you accidentally delete the group repos?”

I was met with some hostility:

Bear in mind, I had asked if he accidentally deleted the group repositories. I had left him an out, on purpose, to save face, so we can just fix this and move on with our lives. My friend at the birthday party picked up on this immediately too – during the conversation, he was like, “…and you asked him if he accidentally did it too, instead of blaming him.”

I had been out with the family and saw his response when I got in, during the afternoon. Seeing his reaction, I tried to do some damage control by letting him know that I wasn’t blaming him. I was asking if he had made a mistake and deleted the repositories and was unsure if he had seen anything that we’d shared on Slack because we hadn’t heard a word from him thus far.

There was no response.

The waiting game

A week passed without an update from our TL, who had claimed that he would “try to figure out” what happened in his irate message in the channel. A second week passed with no update. A third week passed, and he finally responded to us in a thread where we were wondering aloud about what was going on and recounting what we actually did have to work with, with regard to personal repositories.

In his thread response, he offered a .zip file with the backend that he had worked on and then reminded us of what we already knew – that our 2nd Senior React developer had shared links to what he had been able to salvage. He added that the back end had also been deployed to Heroku, a hosting platform, since early on.

I had only completed unit 1 at Lambda. I was now working on unit 2, which focuses on JavaScript. I had no idea how to work with a back end or do anything with React, let alone reassemble the project from multiple people’s work on different repositories (of which not all had been accounted for). There was also no update about what progress had been made since he had been trying to figure out what happened.

Done waiting

Ok. Three weeks had passed with no substantive update. Two additional weeks had passed before that, in which the organization had gone missing, but we hadn’t yet brought it up as a group in Slack. Enough was enough. I didn’t have any confidence that our TL was invested in resolving this. He had most likely deleted the repos, for whatever reason, and was now hoping that enough time would pass that GitHub would permanently remove them and the entire incident could be chalked up to some nebulous mishap on their part. That wasn’t going to get our React people back their work.

On the second week that we hadn’t heard anything from our TL, I had reached out to GitHub via the support link on their website, because I knew that we had 90 days to resolve this and didn’t know what their turnaround time was, either. I explained the situation to them, letting them know that I was a Lambda School student, had worked on a group project and was suspicious that our work had been deleted by our team lead. I asked if anything could be done on their part to restore the organization and our repositories.

It took 20 days to get a response from GitHub, but when it arrived, it confirmed my suspicions. There had been no accident. I didn’t ask for confirmation about who had committed the non-accident, because I was focused on just getting the team’s work back. Unfortunately, they could not restore the organization at my request. That had to come from an owner of the organization.

I went back to Slack and shared a screenshot of the email with the team. I asked our TL to please contact GitHub so we could get the organization restored. I went back to GitHub and asked if our TL could respond to the email thread or if he needed to open a new ticket. They informed me that a new ticket was needed, and gave me a reference number to include which would tie its history to my original ticket. I updated Slack with this information as well.

A second opinion

Anticipating that I would continue to be ignored by our build week TL, I reached out to my original TL from when I was a full-time student. He had been my main adviser when I started the program and also knew a little about what had happened from when I posted in that group, asking the team there if anything like this had happened to them and gotten the response with the procedure to try (which didn’t work). I remember that one of the other people from my original group had also come to the same conclusion as me with the whole matter – he said that my build week TL “probably deleted it.”

We Zoomed and I explained the situation to him. He said that first and foremost, he was appalled that anyone would act like this. Lambda vets their TLs and prides themselves on picking those who can support their teams. But also, as with any group that we’re part of in life, we have to deal with many personalities and situations. I broke down the lengthy time period without updates from the build week TL, and the confirmation from GitHub Support that the organization had been deleted. I told him that I was conflicted because in his original profile picture, I saw the build week TL’s daughter with him, and she was around the same age as my older daughter. I didn’t want to make some kid’s father into a villain, but he was hurting my team and wasn’t doing anything to correct it. I told him that I felt like I was making excuses for him by even considering this, what the build week TL’s workload might be like (I didn’t know if he really was up until 5:30 AM helping other teams, but it was hurting mine). I didn’t know if he had just overextended himself. The list went on.

Ultimately, he said that I was doing the right thing. He said that it was commendable that I had reached out to someone for a second opinion before making any final decisions – something that he thought more people needed to do, and that it was also commendable that I had taken initiative with this. That’s something that had also made me feel a little uncomfortable with this whole situation. My work was relatively safe. Sure, it wouldn’t link out to anyone else’s, but I had all of it. I was doing this to help everyone else preserve their work. Thus far, I hadn’t received any backup from any of them. Two had actually made soft excuses for the build week TL. Until reaching out to my old full-time TL, I had been soloing the mission.

It was a relief to hear his view and get acknowledgement that I was doing the right thing. He advised me to reach out to the other TL again and even offer to write the email to GitHub for him, because it takes all of the road bumps out of the way, although he didn’t know if this was overstepping and how it might be taken. He said make sure that I said the issue was time-sensitive now and to give him until the end of the following business day for a response, and if there wasn’t one, to escalate to Student Success. He finally said that Lambda don’t look kindly at this kind of behavior from TLs, although he had never heard of it happening before, and that it would also look good for me, because I was being responsible, stepping up and taking action.

Resolution

That last exchange happened on a Friday. I didn’t give the build week TL until the end of Saturday to reply. I gave him the entire weekend, and most of Monday. Of course, there was radio silence from him. I reached out to Student Success, to a person who I had worked with before to flex from full-time to part-time. In the afternoon, when I went to pick my daughter up from school, she messaged me back and we Zoomed in the car, before I drove home with the kiddo.

I explained the entire situation to her, from the start, through the waiting, through GitHub’s messages and to my old TL’s advice that I escalate to her team. She said that when I had messaged her, she wasn’t expecting this, but that Lambda had systems in place to deal with it. I let her know that I had screenshots of the entire situation from Slack – they’re the ones with the user information that I edited out to make images for this post. I offered to send them to her when I got home. She agreed to see them, so 40 mins later, after I had gotten home and settled the kids, I sent them through direct message on Slack.

We were originally going to have a follow-up Zoom after I sent the screenshots, but after review, she said that she had plenty of information to go off of. She would be working with another person in Student Success and would initially reach out to the build week TL and get the GitHub ticket going. She said that she appreciated that I made it simple for him to do that, and also know that it was time-sensitive. We could still meet if I wanted to, but considering that she had what she needed, I decided to let her have at it, instead of further taking from her time.

I thanked my Student Success contact for her help and gave her kudos for my old TL. I told her that he was the blueprint for what a TL should be. I really think that he is. He invests in us, goes above and beyond to help us and offers sound advice. I really do appreciate his counsel. I also asked her, if possible, to have the build week TL include someone at Lambda in his emails with GitHub, to make sure that he actually was doing was was asked, considering how long he had been dragging his feet with my team.

Three minutes later, she replied with a message from the other person she was working on this with. The build week TL said that he would take care of it, and that he was going to alert them when it was done. I suggested that if GitHub needs to assign an owner to the repo, that they include everyone from the team – something that my old TL had said had been done for some of his projects (it might have been a Labs project).

The next day, it was done.

There was a short message with no context from our build week TL on Slack that Monday. It simply said, “Sent in a new ticket.” I don’t know if anyone else in the channel would have known what it referenced. I thanked the TL with a “thank you” emoji.

On Tuesday, one day after speaking with Student Success, the build week TL left a second message. It said, “Squared away. Everyone has an invite as an owner. Enjoy.” I thanked him for that as well. He left the channel, along with 3 other people from the group.

I messaged Student Success, to close the loop, and thanked them again for their involvement. They really did get this resolved, when I was getting nothing. My experiences with them have been fantastic, to date. When switching from full-time to part-time, they offered a lot of information and had me flexed quickly, and now, when I let them know that a TL was causing an issue, they immediately took care of it. They really are a vital component that helps keep the gears at Lambda spinning.

Conclusion

I’m glad it got done. I received an email with an invitation to be an owner of the organization on GitHub from our TL. My assumption is that the others all did as well. Most of them have already rejoined.

I’m a little disappointed that no one else in my build week group stood with me. Its interesting to note that three of them have military backgrounds. I know that a lot of people in the military and on the police force have a tendency to not question authority, and to obey their superiors, hence the chain-of-command and all. I don’t know if that played a role in their not acknowledging that the organization did not delete itself – there’s a process to remove it, as one person in the group stated. They made excuses for the TL that weren’t based on evidence or following a trail. Maybe they were just being “nice” to him. Maybe it was diffusion of authority. I’ll never know. I’ll also never know why the organization was deleted to begin with.

I also haven’t spoken with anyone from the group since all of this happened, so no one there knows my role in helping to save their work. That’s fine with me, but I wonder if the TL said anything to them, because 3 people left the Slack channel almost immediately with him. They probably think that he’d been working on this for weeks, to save their work. Its fine though. The objective was to get everyone’s stuff back, and to save the React developers from having to do what the title of my website actually says.