(This is a funny take on a Friday in the life of a developer. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely intentional.)
It’s Friday morning. With high hopes for the approaching weekend (and no clue of what his inbox holds for him), Javesh C gets ready. The first auto-rickshaw he hails agrees to take him to his office on meter, to his great surprise. Enroute, he plans to finally do the refactoring that always falls victim to two rhyming words, procrastination and deprioritization.
(Fun Fact: Developers procrastinate on coding by coding something else.)
He reaches his office and finds the elevator waiting for him on the ground floor. Two good things in one morning? “Something bad’s waiting for me”, says Javesh as he thinks of all ways he could have screwed-up the last day.
(Fun Fact: Pessimism is developer oxygen.)
The day begins well. Thinking a bit of procrastination won’t do much harm, he browses through some technical articles and stumbles across a Ruby gem — ‘girlfriend’. He goes on to read the documentation on GitHub.
Caption: A glimpse of the documentation
This produces two effects on Javesh -
- The commands make him giggle internally — something he’s mastered working in a crowded office environment.
- Gives him some false hope.
(Fun fact: Developers browse A LOT. Internal giggles is their forte. They like documentations with proper markdown. And, they are mostly single. )
As the gem’s aura wears off his mind, Javesh makes the pilgrimage to the coffee machine. He encounters Ashoka. One thing leads to another and they end up arguing over ‘Which is the best JavaScript framework?’ As things get heated, other developers jump in and the debate lasts over two hours. At the end, JavaScript emerges the loser with everyone agreeing that it’s pretty error-prone. The developers go back to work on their JavaScript projects.
(Fun Facts: Caffeine is developer fuel. JavaScript earns developers money. Most of the time saved by JavaScript frameworks is lost arguing over them.)
Friday evening approaches. Talks of a plan to visit the nearby pub pervade the air. Still no refactoring. Javesh is excited. The time to leave for the day comes. Javesh packs his laptop and headphones and runs for the door. His right foot barely crosses the threshold and his mobile phone beeps. With his heart thumping, he reads the email. A client needs a big ad-hoc change in the product and that too by Monday morning. “A working weekend it is!”, says Javesh with gloomy excitement as he leaves the office to have a great Friday evening in spite of everything.
(Fun Facts:
- Developers have their own religion.
- Gmail notifications on phone are inauspicious signs in developer dharma.
- Fridays are developer festivals. Slack notifications are off on Friday evenings.
- Drinking is rather encouraged. Developers who don’t drink go on to have overpriced coffee.)
BTW, this is Javesh (after hours of bug fixing, that made him question his sanity) -
