Frog and Toad are Cofounders | Hacker News Reader

Frog and Toad are Cofounders

medium.com

387 pointsalexdean34 comments

> Toad deleted tests until the CI server went green.

One of my undergrad volunteers is learning Python. I've had to teach him that just because the code runs, it doesn't mean that it is correct.

These are wonderfully painful to read.

One of my relatively new coworkers did this a while ago, the logic was: "We can't deploy until the build is green, and this test is failing, so I'll just skip this test so we can deploy." Great teachable moment

These stories are so well-written! Really captures the original style well. They remind me a bit of the koans from The Codeless Code. The simplicity of the story obscures its "lessons", allowing you to apply the story to your own experiences and draw your own insights.

I hadn't heard of the source material (perhaps more/only well-known in the US?) but I presume it refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad

Some insightful parables either way, though!

I didn't know about that book and assumed it was a reference to Wind in the Willows. Thanks for looking it up!

I did as well. I assume it's a function of being older and having a British mother :-)

i grew up in the UK on these. Springtime is just around the corner.

I did too, despite being American.

huh! I had also assumed that. I was pretty confused, but as I hadn't read Wind in the Willows in a while, I gave it a pass :)

Yes, these are beloved children stories from the 70s here in America. Arnold Lobel was one of the true greats.

Yes, that's the correct one!

This is one of the most delightful things I've seen come out of the tech satire world. It's not snarky or mean, it's not painting a target on anyone, it's just really meaningful and well done. I'll definitely send these to my team, I think they're really accessible stories about common problems in tech culture. Please keep writing them!

not painting a target on anyone

Oh, I dunno.

That night when Toad went to bed he thought the biggest thoughts he could think...He thought about bringing free internet to countries like India, so that he could show ads to billions of people

OK, would you settle for " … not painting a target on anyone who doesn't deserve it"?

:-)

To be fair, there is a small handful of people in the world for whom Mark Zuckerberg would be punching down. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I didn't interpret that as being particularly mean though. It's poking fun at Facebook, but not in a cruel way.

It wasn't at all obvious to me, but a random click revealed that each paragraph on this page actually links to a full (short) story...

Being outside the US and unfamiliar with the source material, I read several of them as sort of vague but satisfying vignettes, similar to those in Hagakure, or Zen Koans.

Then I discovered the "read more" links and they took on a totally different character.

I agree: I had the same reaction until I noticed broken phrases and ellipsis (well, and clicked). It's kind of funny because the first few sentences seem good enough when you follow the submitted link...

Sometimes I wish the euphemism "grooming the backlog" was required to be called "making a wish list". I guess that wouldn't sound managerial enough.

Scrum/Agile-English Dictionary. https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/594955.html

>Frog and Toad went back to their alma mater and began to look for an engineer in the tall grass beside the computer science building.

Pokemon reference?

>Toad reviewed his team’s backlog and marked 80% of the open tickets as CRITICAL or BLOCKER.

Ouch.

If I had a dollar for every ticket this was done to on any project I've worked before...well I'd probably own a couple of sports teams by now.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a story marked "minor". Generaly the "priority" of these things is just based on how annoyed the person filing the story was at the time.

I've seen them! Just don't mandate priorities, or be willing to ruthlessly change them as the implementer. Some starting points:

Anything which merely means the publisher won't pay us because it was a milestone deliverable, but which I could see us technically shipping without, is "wontfix."

Anything which will get me fired for not implementing gets to be "minor."

Anything which I will quit over before I can be fired gets to be "major."

Anything which will lead to mass resignations of the entire engineering team gets to be "blocker", but only if it's actually blocking someone else from doing any work whatsoever.

When management starts tracking metrics on how fast major or higher bugs are resolved, most of your issues will magically become minor.

Did he mean that the tickets so marked excluded the technical debt reduction ones ?

That's probably the best thing I've ever read on Medium.

These read slightly better if you read the oldest ones first.

I'm proud to say that one of the authors of this (and the one who apparently was the instigator) was my Operating Systems partner back in college. :D

This is simply delightful. Thank you.

Couldn't stop thinking how much I wanted to bitch slap these amphibians all throughout the read. So well written.

Just perfect.

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