Humor, the software developer's secret weapon

techxplore.com

7 points·sharpshadow··4 comments

I'm happy to see this studied and published. Still, if you have to explain a joke, you kill it.

I'm an office clown but I've learned to keep it all in the chatrooms and ticket descriptions. Cross the wit/work barrier at your org's peril!

Case in point: at my first job, I got bored with a stock image that displayed when the app ran, so I replaced it with a photo of Obama laughing. Handsome devil! And then I committed it by mistake. It could have easily reached production.

The right approach would have been to edit my hosts file, or to use a proxy like Charles to map the image URL to a local Obama. It's a great technique for replacing the Jenkins butler with a rage face. Just, keep it away from the repo!

> But they have to exercise some caution about when and where they insert jokes and comments. They don't want any of their jests to end up on Instagram.

One time a developer was razzing on himself, and put something like "Joe is a moron & wrote this bad code" as a comment about his own code in.

Well, that JavaScript comment made it into the builds. And somehow some random customer named Joe one day found it, and called support all in a huff that we'd decided to, in our ~2MB bundle of JS, insult him personally.

There's another problem these days.

What if adding a timeout of 690ms gets you a HR complaint for sexual harassment? Sadly, true story...

Then HR starts seeing internal services returning 420 Enhance Your Calm codes at them a couple times a day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com