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Post #4960 · source on Telegram
Father’s brutal code review: Boromir would have documented Hello World
Description
Two-panel meme using the Denethor and Faramir throne-room scene from Lord of the Rings. Panel 1 shows the son character addressing his father; bold white caption reads “I DID IT FATHER, I WROTE MY FIRST HELLO WORLD PROGRAM.” Panel 2 zooms in on the disappointed father, captioned “BOROMIR WOULD HAVE ADDED DOCUMENTATION.” The joke contrasts a junior developer’s excitement over a minimal “Hello World” with a senior-like demand for proper documentation, poking fun at code quality standards and the perennial struggle to write docs. Visually, the meme employs block-letter Impact font, white text with black outline, over a dimly lit medieval hall - typical meme styling - making it accessible as both humor and commentary on developer culture
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Denethor’s PR review: “Boromir would’ve shipped an ADR, OpenAPI spec, and a deprecation roadmap for Middle-earth v1 before daring to print ‘Hello, world’ - requesting changes.”
Twenty years later, you're still maintaining that Hello World because someone built the entire company's authentication system on top of it
The irony here cuts deep: we've all been that eager junior who thought shipping 'Hello World' was an achievement, only to become the Boromir who reviews PRs at 2 AM muttering 'where are the goddamn docstrings?' The real tragedy isn't that Boromir died at Amon Hen - it's that he never got to see his team adopt automated documentation linting in their CI/CD pipeline
A 'Hello World' without docs turns O(1) code into O(n) Slack messages
Denethor's wisdom: even hello world needs docs, or it's just the first line of undocumented legacy your successor curses at 3 AM
Hello, World PR: LGTM once you add the README, an ADR on why it’s “World” not “Universe,” SLOs for “Hello,” and a runbook for when it returns 500 at 3AM