In my day job I send a lot of very routine emails announcing new deployments or pleading with people to fix the continuous build. I’ve started to amuse myself by sending them as haikus (3 line poems with 5, 7 then 5 syllabus on each line). I don’t think anyone has noticed. They just think I’m being a bit more terse than usual.

I this spirit I’m going to share with you 10 more beautiful haikus about software development. I’m sure you’ll agree that they capture the exquisite beauty of the software craft, the bittersweet sadness of an application crash and the inevitable fragility of a software patch to live. They are also short, don’t have to rhyme and are easy to write.

Traditional haiku collections are split into seasons. I’ll also split them but into categories that better juxtapose the joys and frustrations of the software development cycle.

Development Operations

Build server is slow
Disk whirs, lights flash but no builds
Request SSD

Test build being deployed
We wait for the build green line
Sadness. It’s amber

TFS build red
Queue the integration build
TFS still red

Build has been deployed
Is available for test
Please handle with care

Coding

SOLID principles
SRP and OCP
Still don’t know Liskov

Flakey code base
Instigate peer code reviews
No one has the time

Application crash
Detailed error report but
Where is the stack trace?

The Workplace

Corporate fruit bowl
Apples, bananas and plums
No-one eats kiwi

Our daily stand up
Managers attend. Involved,
But not committed

Professional Development

Personal dev blog
I watch the web traffic. Why?
I don’t really know