Coding Challenge: Don't Touch Your Face
Description
This image is a screenshot of a tweet that captures a specific dilemma for developers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tweet, from a user with a circular profile picture of a woman outdoors, asks, 'Does anyone know how to code without facepalming?'. The text is accompanied by a female facepalm emoji. Below this, in a prominent blue font, are the hashtags '#WashYourHands #COVID19'. The meme's humor comes from the direct collision of a deeply ingrained developer habit - facepalming in response to bugs, errors, or general frustration - with the urgent public health advice of the time to avoid touching one's face to prevent the spread of infection. It's a simple, relatable post that highlights how a universal coding trope gained a new layer of real-world consequence
Comments
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In 2020, the most critical code review wasn't for logic errors, it was your webcam catching you touching your face after a failed build
Pro tip: treat legacy code like COVID - keep 6 feet of abstraction, sanitize every commit, and whatever you do, don’t touch your face after a git blame
The CDC recommends not touching your face, but they've clearly never tried to debug a race condition that only happens in production on Tuesdays during a full moon
The real question isn't whether you can code without facepalming - it's whether you've achieved the senior engineer milestone of facepalming *before* even reading the code, just from seeing the PR title, the Jira ticket description, or hearing 'we need to support IE11.' At 15+ YoE, the facepalm becomes preemptive: a defensive reflex honed by years of legacy codebases, production incidents at 3 AM, and stakeholders asking 'how hard could it be?' The pandemic gave us hand sanitizer; experience gives us the wisdom to know that no amount of washing will cleanse what we've seen in that 10,000-line God class
Even post-20 YoE, facepalming remains the one distributed system guarantee: eventual palm-forehead consistency
New PR policy: for every WTF/min in your diff, increase sanitizer throughput - finally, backpressure on facepalms
Want to code without facepalming? Sure - just make requirements Consistent, Available, and Partition‑tolerant. Until product beats CAP, I’ll keep washing up for the inevitable eventual facepalms