A Sentence Only Programmers Will Understand.

Every profession has their shorthand, slang and shibboleths. Programming is no different and after a Facebook conversation with a friend that confused everyone who wasn’t in our field I came up with this sentence.

I was yak shaving after management decided that mythical man monthing was a silver bullet, after rubber ducking though I think I’m bike shedding.

This roughly translates to:

“I was making a what I thought were a bunch of small changes that would allow us to ship the next release. I needed to do this since the project was running late, so management hired a bunch of new people to fix that. Training them took so long though that the project became even later. After sitting down and explaining the changes to myself out loud I realized I was actually making trivial changes not important ones.”

Thanks to Ryan Galgon who’s conversation with me inspired this sentence.