Imperative Animals
Ship It Squirrel gets a family
The team at GitHub is responsible for one of the single greatest creations in all of computer science, Ship It Squirrel. He embodies their culture of shipping early and often.
At Intent Media, we share a similar love for shipping early and often, so we also encourage people to, “Ship It!” using a dashing squirrel in a hat. But over time, I noticed this valuable member of our team growing lonely. So, I commissioned a New York artist to create him a family of imperative animals.
The imperative animals are designed to address a wide range of software development activities.
Sometimes you need to encourage people to just get some code out the door, no matter how imperfect.
Ship It Squirrel
Other times, you just need to get rid of some cruft, excise some corrupt data, or just take out that flaky test.
Delete It Chipmunk
If your build is broken, but master is fine, then you’ve likely got a stale branch.
Rebase It Badger
When the app should run but doesn’t and throws exceptions about columns, then you’ve likely got a stale database snapshot.
Migrate It Groundhog
Emoji It
To help you work the imperative animals into your daily software development workflow, here are some Slack-ready images that are easy to import as custom emoji.
This family of imperative animals is a versatile group, capable of taking on a wide range of software development challenges. Arguably, they could form the cornerstones of a new dev onboarding process, teaching new recruits the fundamentals of sound EDD (Emoji-Driven Development).
It’s also possible that your team needs more imperative animals than this. If you decide to populate your own magical forest of imperative animals, I’d love it if you let me know here on Medium or on Twitter.
Happy shipping, deleting, rebasing, and migrating!
All art created by an anonymous NYC artist.
No animals were harmed in the making of these pictures.
