Thursday, March 28, 2024

Developers, Please Take a Break

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Some developers crank out code for years…and years…and years. How do you know when it’s perhaps been a bit toooo long? Alex Genadinik offers some light-hearted suggestions.

As software engineers, we are often faced with difficult and abstract challenges. At times we can get quite carried away with solving our engineering problems and lose all track of time. This is my somewhat comical list of ways we can catch ourselves when we’ve been programming for too long.

  1. You reverse camelback Irish names like mCcourt and mCdonalds.
  2. You see yourself as the Moses of the “Mac or PC” debate, carrying around stone tablets with 10 reasons why your choice is the correct one. And most of the time you instigate the debates yourself just so you can quickly recite your reasons.
  3. On family vacations, sea shells on the beach make you want to write your own UNIX shell — better than the one you wrote after the previous family vacation — and brag about it.
  4. You impress the opposite sex by telling them you invented computers; and they actually believe you.
  5. You impress young people by telling them how little RAM your computers had “back in the day” and how you were able to crunch so many formulas. They don’t really understand you but always just nod to make you feel better.
  6. You don’t fear spiders, cockroaches, flies or bees. But P1 and P2 bugs give you nightmares.
  7. After 20 years, you still don’t understand what the “business guy” is talking about during company meetings. You use those meetings to load up on muffins.
  8. Read the rest about Developers who’ve developed too long at Devx.

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