The Classic 'NVM' Pun for Node.js Developers
Description
A three-panel comic strip titled 'Manorisms' illustrates a common developer in-joke. In the first panel, two developers are working on their laptops side-by-side. A woman with a ponytail and an annoyed expression asks her male colleague, 'Hey, what was that program that switches between versions of node?'. In the second panel, the man looks puzzled and thinks, 'Hmm... uhh...', while the woman continues to look on. In the final panel, the man has a look of annoyed realization while the woman smiles, having figured it out herself, and says, 'nvm, figured it out!'. The footer of the comic contains the text 'elijahmanor.com/pun-switch' and '@elijahmanor'. The humor is a pun based on the tool 'nvm' (Node Version Manager), a command-line utility for managing multiple Node.js versions. The male developer initially interprets 'nvm' as the common abbreviation for 'never mind', leading to his confusion, only to realize it's the actual name of the program his colleague was trying to remember. This is a highly relatable joke for any developer who has worked with Node.js
Comments
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There are two types of Node developers: those who get this joke, and those who are about to spend an hour debugging their global npm packages
“nvm” in our shop means I quietly jumped from Node 20 back to 8 so the 2014 gulpfile would build - never mind the decade of tech debt
The real version switching happens when you realize half your team uses nvm, the other half uses n, someone insists on volta, and that one person still manually downloads Node binaries because 'it's more reliable' - meanwhile production is running a version from 2019 that nobody dares to touch
The beautiful irony here is that by the time you've context-switched from your current task to recall which version manager you're using (nvm? n? fnm? asdf? volta?), the person asking has already gone through the five stages of grep, found the answer in their shell history, and moved on. It's the distributed systems problem of human communication: by the time the response arrives, the requester's state has already changed, making the answer obsolete. Classic eventual consistency in action
The only CLI where the fix and the Slack update are the same token: nvm - ship an .nvmrc and onboarding stops asking “which Node?”
In enterprise JS, “nvm use” isn’t choosing a Node version - it’s picking which decade of build tooling you want to suffer today
NVM: Because one Node version to bind them all would shatter the sacred art of 'npm install && pray'