When Dogs🐶 Howl, Developers Debug

                                                           Photo by Karsten Winegeart @karsten116 on Unsplash

The thing nobody tells you about dog ownership is the weird and wonderful grunts and sighs they make. Seriously, it’s like they’re a real animal that can express much more than a few barks or howls.

Developers are similar. We might have reputations that we aren’t “people people” and are difficult to speak to, but the reality is our communication is much more nuanced than that. We have our own weird and wonderful ways for communicating frustration, triumph and despair.

Let’s explore this level of communication and see why this secret code is in place.

The Growl of the Merge Conflict

Software developers have been there. Knee-deep in code, wading through bugs and feature requests. You’re getting somewhere and BAM! The merge conflict hits.

Your perfect code is intertwined with someone else’s and it’s now all a tangled mess. What do you do? You growl. Your soul vibrates with the sound of wasted hours and dashed hopes.

Why you don’t say anything: You think that it’s not becoming of a developer at your level of experience to struggle with a simple merge. Little do you know every developer has issues like this, no matter the skill or seniority.

The Whimper of the Overloaded Sprint

We all know a sprint should be fast (hence the name, right?). So why does software development feel like a marathon where the next section coming over the hill is incrementally worse than the last? Each new task (no matter how trivial) is just adding hours to an overlong day.

Why you don’t say anything: Who needs sleep when you’ve got coffee.

The Howl of the Late-Nite Debugging Session

Six cups of coffee (and a bowl of ramen) in, and that one last bug just won’t quit. You stare at the code like a 1990's magic-eye picture, hoping the solution will appear. 

Once you find it’s a semicolon, you leap up and howl with joy. You wake the neighbour’s dog who rather than joining in barks for the next 3 hours.

Why don’t you say anything: Who wants to tell their colleagues that they howl?

The Grunt of the Meeting

Endless meetings. They keep going on, and they keep coming. Developers are much like sloths in these meetings, half-awake and barely moving. Many developers use Agile meetings as a chance to catch up on sleep (or sit staring at the wall). When asked how the ticket is going, they grunt in agreement, that’s just the most appropriate thing to say.

Why you don’t say anything: We just don’t have the energy, do we?

The Defeated Whimper

I know you are fully aware of this one.

Why you don’t say anything: Nothing else will do.

Conclusion

Developers might not have tails to wag, but we do have a locker of unintelligible sounds that reveal our state of mind during the working day.

A growl here, a grunt there. Our nearest and dearest might understand, but the rest of the world will never appreciate just what this means to us.