Words of Wisdom

Over the past two and a half years that i’ve worked at my current job, we’ve had a white board where every now and then someone will scribble up something a member of the team says. Some are profound. Some are silly. Some are complete inside jokes that nobody else would understand. But i thought it would be fun to present a few of them here (perhaps with a little commentary) to share our wisdom with the world.

We’re going to untickle the tickle – HM

In code-speak, when you exercise a portion of the program in a new way that causes a bug, you’ve ‘tickled a bug’. It’s something that doesn’t normally happen, but due to whatever circumstances, this particular time the bug rears its head.

Try to preserve the inert functionality of existing code – anon

We were rewriting a piece of code – doing a replacement because the existing codebase was not maintainable. Why in the world would we want to keep functionality that wasn’t even used by the old code when the whole point is to clean things up? Shows you where old management’s head was at the time.

Stoppy stoppy is bad – BX

Yes it is. We don’t like stoppy stoppy. Things must GO!

FATAL by default – MP

It sounds like a cool name for a rock band. In this case it’s nothing so glamorous. It simply refers to the fact that in our logging system, we only log fatal errors by default.

Did you pull a D? – GR

One of those inside jokes. D is a great programmer. However, he would often do a very large checkin on Friday night and then go on vacation for a week. Inevitably he would introduce a bug that we’d have to deal with while he was gone. He wasn’t the only one to do this. Hence the saying.

Qualify the fact that they aren’t qualified – PC

When working with incompetent 3rd parties, it’s important to be able to let management know exactly WHY they suck.

It’s hard to quantify with numbers – GR

Uh, who hired this guy?

I give you my word that you can trust me – anon quoting Lex Luthor

Referring, of course, to Product Management and their ability (or lack thereof) to stick to the agreed upon schedule/task list regardless of customer pressure.

‘Can I ask for a translation?’ (Guy); It’s the bomb! -SH

I guess the dazzling slide show and tech speak just wasn’t cutting it. Had to dumb down the presentation to get the point across.

Watch with detached amusement – DM

On how we should be thinking about the company and its pursuit of funding after it almost shut down and 90% of the workforce was laid off.

Simple to use for the un-nerdly – anon

On what makes a great UI. This is in direct contradiction to one of my personal favorite quotes:

If it was hard to code, it should be hard to use – Klingon proverb

We will let you know our findings as soon as we find them – SH

When in doubt, this is the answer.

You can’t solve an organizational problem with a technical solution – MP

Referring to differences between engineering teams and difficult personalities and management putting their head in the sand rather than making some hard decisions that might offend someone.

Snazziness comes from snappiness – DM

A fast UI (that might not be super flashy) is preferable to a UI that looks amazing but is sluggish. Of course, the worst of all worlds is an ugly UI that’s also slow.