Cloudberry Fever
Every July, my parents get infected with something called cloudberry fever. Cloudberry (lat. Rubus chamaemorus) is native to the Arctic and subarctic regions of the north temperate zone and has edible raspberry-like fruit. The berry is not only a treasured delicacy of the north, but amongst the local people, it is also like gold in a very practical sense. It paid for my first pair of Levis jeans and high school books.
To highlight the importance of this northern gold, I have now lived down in Southern Finland for the past two decades and my parents rarely visit my family during the summer. Not because of the distances but because of bad FOMO - fear of missing out - during the cloudberry season.
Note: Finland is a very long country reaching from the Arctic all the way to the Baltic sea
The Fever
People in the north closely follow the ripening of the berries. This includes frequent visits to your known berry swamps, chats with peers by the local grocery store, and nowadays also following social media. It seems like there’s an unspoken game around the cloudberry picking season, one that everyone plays, but no one talks about. You are forbidden from revealing your berry spots - of ancient knowledge - to others, yet everyone tries to guess the photo locations from all the photos posted on places like Instagram. Of course, the season is dependent on weather so there isn’t an exact date when cloudberries are ready to be picked.
“One summer my father was visiting my family and suddenly the season got early, and he was too late. I still hear about that.”
Last summer I was visiting my parents when the season was in full swing. As a family member, I was expected and privileged to join the picking. But first, we needed to wait until the evening, not to wait for the sun to go down - it does not, welcome to the north - but for the temperature to cool a little. We drove many kilometers outside the village, first on the main road, then we took a turn to a gravel road, and continued until roads got smaller and smaller, nearly undrivable. When we arrived at the spot, my father drove our car to a secluded spot, almost as if trying to hide it away. Hide it away from who, I cannot say, as we were in the middle of the wilderness. He definitely did not want others to know of this spot.
We took the buckets with us, a small backpack with water and snacks, put rubber boots on our feet, and equipped ourselves with mosquito hats and insect repellent. There are millions of these little guys keeping you loud company at the swamp where the berries grow
We headed to the woods, my almost 70 year old father jumping agilely from one hummock to another, me following along clumsily with my urbanized feet. Of course, we did not follow any trails or maps, only his prior and traditional knowledge of the landscape. Soon the swamp was before our very eyes and the excitement was tangible when we were about to start the picking. Would there be ripe berries? How much would we get?
Young Virpi at the swamp
For me, the swamp is also somewhat frightening. I have participated in this tradition since childhood, and have been warned about the scary sinkholes more times than I can count. I still remember how some granny was lost during the cloudberry season and was never found - the swamp had maybe swallowed her. Now I'm grown up, and as soon as my father had disappeared from sight I needed to venture and cope alone. And most importantly, gain a bucket full of berries.
My father, because of his decades of experience, is a very quick picker. He knows how to move on morass and fen, where to place his feet. Choosing the right spots is essential: if we would only go to the areas of the swamp with solid ground, we would get few or no berries at all. You need to boldly step out of your comfort zone, and explore the jiggling wet parts. As you go along, you realize that you start to trust your instincts and start to find more and more berries.
There are however underlying risks. For example, you can get cloudberry fever. It’s not some mosquito-borne infectious disease, but more like the contagious excitement of a gold rush. For example, one summer my father needed the money and selling some of the berries is a good extra income to locals, so he got highly infected. He was out on the swamp alone, and as mentioned, no one gets to know the precise location where he is. Often there’s no mobile phone network coverage either. He was dressed in a green mosquito-cover jacket and camo pants, which makes him invisible to search and rescue if that were needed. Because the berry harvest was so good, he forgot to eat his snacks and had also forgotten hydration. "I'll just take that bush and then stop", he had been thinking for too long. So he began to feel nauseous, and also started hallucinating: berries began to float in the air. Luckily help was near. Cloudberries are very moist with plenty of sugar and vitamins. So eventually he survived home - with two 50-liter sacks of berries - but the family obviously got upset with him as the ingredients of a disaster were there. He is not a young boy anymore.
Bringing it all back to software
My life has carried me far from the Arctic swamps and the indigenous lifestyle of my childhood family to southern Finland working in the it-industry as a quality assurance consultant. Yet I find those practical childhood teachings useful to this day and a good mirror for my work.
Thankfully, unlike with cloudberry hunting, Quality Assurance in the IT industry does not have to be a game of hide-and-seek. Instead, we should openly rely on the knowledge of our peers and colleagues and use it to create maps that keep us on the path towards better quality. We want to make sure that together we cover as wide an area as possible, to uncover as many cloudberries as possible - uncovered defects, findings, etc. -. We want to use our expertise as software testers to find the hidden trails to the cloudberry treasure troves.
Like the swamps, software development has many dangers. We need to plan and act accordingly to avoid “cloudberry fever”. We need to know what is too much, when to quit, and where to focus. We need to make agile moves to get a better yield. We need to prepare for risks, and build tools so that the endless swamp of development does not swallow us. Tools like automated tests and good practices can help us stay dry even if the path we’ve walked before changes.
When we have thoughtfully listened and learned from more experienced people, when we have ourselves touched our feet on the grounds of software testing, wandered the more obvious paths, looked around us a bit, we are ready. Ready to explore what may seem hidden, or what someone even wants to remain a secret, but shouldn’t. Ready to wander outside the paths, because we already know the landscape. We are ready to help less experienced peers to take steps outside solid grounds and find out whether the more frightening areas have treasures waiting to be found. We can build infrastructure along the trails to make checking things easier. Or we can help others by standing on a hill near the swamp, explaining the best strategies for getting things done. We can stop the “cloudberry fever”, by defining when enough is enough. Because together we can find the most berries, be it from a forest, swamp or a codebase.