One Does Not Simply 'Just Add a Small Feature'
Description
This meme uses the 'One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor' format, featuring the character Boromir from 'The Lord of the Rings'. The text overlay reads, 'One does not simply... just add a small feature.' The meme humorously captures the reaction of an experienced developer when a project manager or client underestimates the complexity of a feature request. The phrase 'just add a small feature' is a classic red flag for developers, as it often signals a lack of understanding of the underlying codebase and the potential for cascading changes, bugs, and unforeseen technical challenges. This meme is highly relatable to senior engineers who have learned through painful experience that there is no such thing as a 'small' change in a large, complex system
Comments
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The project manager says, 'It's just a small change.' The senior dev hears, 'I've scheduled a surprise refactoring of the entire monolith for you, and the deadline was yesterday.'
A TypeScript PR that lives long enough for a third-birthday cake isn’t awaiting review - it’s quietly transitioning from feature branch to legacy system
Three years waiting for a TypeScript PR review? That's actually faster than migrating our legacy jQuery app to React - we're still debating whether to use class components or hooks
After three years in review, this PR has officially outlived most JavaScript frameworks, survived multiple TypeScript major versions, and accumulated enough merge conflicts to require archaeological excavation. At this point, the cake's frosting has better type safety than the original code submission - and both are equally likely to get consumed before the PR merges
When your TypeScript PR turns three, it qualifies for LTS - the flaky dependency is reviewer bandwidth, not CI
At three years old, a PR graduates from stale-bot to legacy - by the time CODEOWNERS rotates again, the rebase diff is longer than the design doc, and the only thing to hit production is the cake
This PR has more tenure than some SREs at Microsoft - promote it to main before it demands a corner office