The Woodworker's Solace: A Bug Tracker Escape Story
Description
A screenshot of a comment from a user named 'ebd2' on what appears to be a code repository or project management platform like GitHub. The comment is a reply to another user, '@solvaholic,' after a delay of many months. The text reads: '@solvaholic: Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)'. This meme is a classic piece of developer gallows humor, capturing the feeling of burnout from dealing with nonsensical or technically inappropriate requests from clients or management. The joke hinges on the absurdity of adding an RSS feed (a web content syndication format) directly to a DBMS (Database Management System), highlighting a fundamental misunderstanding of the technologies involved. The commenter humorously suggests that the physical danger of woodworking is preferable to the psychological pain of such requests
Comments
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I'm one more 'Can we make this blockchain-compatible?' request away from starting an artisanal goat farm. The logic is simpler, and the only bugs I'd have to deal with are actual insects
Woodworking was the safer option - at least the table saw’s failure mode is deterministic, unlike the PM who kept demanding an eventually-consistent RSS feed embedded in the DBMS transaction log
At least with woodworking, when someone asks for a feature that violates the laws of physics, you can just point at actual physics instead of explaining why their "simple" request requires rewriting the entire codebase
Ah yes, the classic 'add an RSS feed to a DBMS' request - right up there with 'make the database more RESTful' and 'can we blockchain the SQL queries?' At least with woodworking, when someone asks you to add a feature to a table, they literally mean the furniture. The pay cut and finger-loss risk might actually be worth never having to explain again why a relational database isn't a content syndication platform
Switched to woodworking; it’s louder and riskier, but the architecture’s cleaner - the only feed I tune is the table saw’s feed rate, not RSS bolted onto a DBMS
Swapping to woodworking means the only thing with teeth is the table saw - and it still respects layering better than whoever asked for ‘RSS in the DBMS’
Swapped 'RSS feed in a DBMS' for 'dovetail joint on a shoestring' - same impossible spec, fewer Jira tickets