The Covfefe Code and Stack Overflow
I have this thing for dumb Internet memes. Whatever beliefs you hold, from whichever lens you see the world, however you view a certain political leader, you might have found yourself asking…what does “covfefe” mean?
Silly memes aside, we often find ourselves digging into code asking “what does this mean”. When I started coding, for me that was every ten minutes. If not for my colleague Kang, I don’t think I would have been my job for very long.

A lot of what I was working on though was undecipherable. Luckily, my manager was a patient teacher. He said my challenges mostly stemmed from my code not following his four levels of good programming practice:
- Clean — code that is easily readable, uses standard variable names, etc.
- Comments — descriptions at particular sections of code
- Commits — markers of what changed in the code
- Documentation — the objective the code accomplishes
Each level provides a higher order of understanding of the code. Still, there was no shortage of “what is it” type of questions. And as my questions evolved into “how does it do this” and “why does it do this”, I would spend hours unwinding spaghetti code and cryptic logic.
That’s where Stack Overflow fills the gap, as a “fifth level” of understanding. Whereas the other four levels are foundational, Q&A functions as the in-the-moment contextual understanding of code. It’s like Kang but scaled out exponentially without the inconvenient shoulder taps.
This is especially a challenge in large companies with disperse developer teams. There are no physical or virtual Kang’s you can rely on. Chat comes and goes, code commits are cryptic, docs & wikis get stale, and email is, well, email. Nothing brings it together, makes it easy to find and allows a community to contribute. That is the reason we created Stack Overflow Enterprise, to have all these questions and answers in one place.
What is your go to method for finding information inside your company?

Do you actually write ‘clean code’?
No detergent required…
I help senior IT leaders and companies solve the challenges involved in digital transformation and moving towards a developer-centric culture that delivers innovation and customer value. In my day job, you can find me here.
