Abbreviate And Suffer The Consequences

You spend weeks crafting a beautiful UI with separate food bowls, carefully positioned for optimal feeding efficiency. Then your users show up and completely ignore your meticulously designed architecture, sprawling across the entire interface like they're at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Eight years in frontend development and I've learned one truth: no matter how intuitive you think your design is, users will find a way to use it wrong. It's not a bug, it's a feature of human nature.

Content Chris Albon chrisalbon Software engineering pro-tip: Follow Do not, I repeat, do not deploy this week. That is how you end up debugging a critical issue from your parent's wifi in your old bedroom while your spouse hates you for abandoning them with your racist uncle. 8:49 PM - 19 Dec 2017 11,775 Retweets 23,488 Likes 254 17 12K 23K Sat

The rarest miracle in the developer universe! Posting a question on StackOverflow without getting it immediately closed as "duplicate" or "not specific enough" is shocking enough. But then—gasp—someone actually answers it? With a solution that WORKS?! This is basically the programming equivalent of winning the lottery while being struck by lightning during a solar eclipse. The escalating shock faces perfectly capture that feeling when you expect public humiliation but somehow end up with working code instead. The true StackOverflow experience: equal parts terror and occasional divine intervention.

Product Manager: "I want developers to lower me into my grave so they can LET ME DOWN one last time." Developer: "At least this requirement is clear." QA Engineer: "But is it though? With coffin or without? Which developers? What's the timeline? Need acceptance criteria for 'lowering'. Please clarify the definition of 'grave'. What's our fallback plan if developers are unavailable? Have we considered edge cases like zombie apocalypse?" The eternal dev cycle: PM makes vague request → Dev thinks they understand → QA finds 47 ambiguities that nobody considered. Rinse and repeat until retirement... or funeral.

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Content Nicholas C. Zakas slicknet "Don't be too clever," is one of my mantras. "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan 4:48 AM Mar 24, 2016 912 905 people are Tweeting about this