#software engineering humor

[raindoor]

At a work meeting, discussing "stories" (in software engineering / scrum parlance, work tickets for implementing pieces of functionality):

Coworker: "Do we have a story for user greed"?

Greed? Even though this is investment industry, I thought that we referred to our users' motivations with more polite euphemisms.

I look up at the screen. Oh, he meant "grid". User grid! Whew.

[raindoor]

Fun with the Y2K problem

There has been some talk in the media about the Y2K problem, since this year marks its 25th anniversary. As an Ancient Being, I do remember vividly the worry about the Y2K bug, and I do remember developers at many companies and institutions working frantically to fix it. It was thanks to all of their efforts that Y2K turned out to be non-issue.

The startup that I was working at the time - a "dotcom" of the dotcom era - did not have Y2K-vulnerable code, since our code was all new. But the devteam found other ways to mark that date. In the morning of January 1, 2000, the customers that logged into our online banking system found a message welcoming them to the year 1900 and promising them a free buggy whip if they open an account.

[raindoor]

Heard a non-native English speaker on the radio today pronounce "infrastructure" like "infrastruggle".

Thinking about the endless, ongoing AWS permissions problems I'm facing at work: yes, that's what I will call cloud infrastructure from now on.

[raindoor]

At work, where about 95% software engineers are from India, there have been jokes flying about the ongoing AWS outage being caused by someone leaving for Diwali and forgetting to patch up some system.

[raindoor]

Coworker: "I'm trying to right-click on you and clone you, but it doesn't work. It only works in JIRA."

This was news to me. But it is not entirely surprising that in the vast, sprawling jungle of JIRA functionality, its ability to clone people is overlooked by most software developers.