Because it came up here and I don’t want to derail the thread further, here are some fun activities developers engage in
Bike-shedding. Arguing the details of small, trivial changes ad nauseum.
“More bike-shedding to the God of bike-shedding” (a Serbian dev)
Yak shaving. Getting lost in technical detours, in lots and lots of small tasks that absolutely must be done before a big task can be tackled. Procrastination, but productive procrastination! Whether that yak actually needed to be shaved quite that closely can be a matter of debate.
“Let me just update this package and I can get going, ok that requires an OS upgrade, I need to change my Ansible and editor config, do I have backups? When did we last test the backups? Are they encrypted?”
Cargo Cult Programming. Everybody does agile, so we most do agile. Everybody does microservices, so we must do microservices. Everything needs to be a factory with three layers of abstraction, even if we are only ever going to support AWS, Google and Azure.
“Servers are an anti-pattern”
Duck. A completely useless feature that was added to appease a stakeholder.
“That animation looks great, CFO. Your nephew made it, did you say?”
Rubberducking. A debugging technique. Explain your code out loud to your rubber duck. No, seriously.
“So you see duckie, I am locking the mutex here, and then when it returns it … ohhhhh”