Revelations from experienced kamikazes of programming
A curated list of words, sounds and cries from programming underworld.
The Night Watch by James Mickens (mirror)
You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis
... if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge.
Programming Sucks by Peter Welch
Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.
Real Programmers ... by Ed Post
Classics from the beginning of times...
Oh, yeah. Been there, seen that. 100500 times.
Parsing HTML with RegEx by bobince et al.
Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide.
Collection of O'rly book covers
Note: Taken from Andreas Zwinkau blog. Text copied from their page and pasted into my html-notepad, switched to Markdown and pasted here.
Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.
- Car Allergic to Vanilla Ice Cream
- Crash Bandicoot
- Crash Cows
- Crashes only on Wednesdays
- Down by Tubes
- Fail on certain Moon Phases
- Flushing the Toilet Stops the Train
- In the Middle of Large Print Jobs
- It's High Tide!
- Missile Control Deadlocks
- More Magic Switch
- OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays
- Packets of Death
- Pallet Kills the Radio
- Real Life Tron
- Sit Down for Log in
- The 500-mile Email
- The little ssh that (sometimes) couldn't
- The Rock Music Filter
- The Story of Mel
- The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down
- Totally USB
Sometimes we need to let people know that our company is still alive. On H/N or somewhere else ... Here is the template of blog post for that. Probability is high that it will start a flame and that is the only thing we need really.
When $FAMOUS_COMPANY launched in 2010, it ran on a single server in $TECHBRO_FOUNDER’s garage. Since then, we’ve experienced explosive VC-funded growth and today we have hundreds of millions of daily active users (DAUs) from all around the globe accessing our products from our mobile apps and on $famouscompany.com. We’ve since made a couple of panic-induced changes to our backend to manage our technical debt (usually right after a high-profile outage) to keep our servers from keeling over. Our existing technology stack has served us well for all these years, but as we seek to grow further it’s clear that a complete rewrite of our application is something which will somehow prevent us from losing two billion dollars a year on customer acquisition.