Chris Oldwood from The OldWood Thing
I’ve used the lightning talks at the last two ACCU conferences as a means of subjecting a captive audience to my dreadful array of programming / IT / geek one liners. (My previous two ACCU stand-up routines are published on this blog as “The Daily Stand-Up†and “Stand-Up and Deliverâ€.) This year was no different, but I wasn’t sure if I had enough “decent†new or unused material to survive the whole 5 minutes; unluckily for the audience I had...
Hence, here are the 34 one-liners I delivered under the title “Wit Limits†[1] at this year’s ACCU conference:
“I thought it was odd when the doctor prescribed ‘programming’ to help me cope with my migraine; then I realised he said ‘codeine’.â€
“These news reports of drone strikes are quite disturbing, but what I don’t understand is why we allowed delivery bots to form unions in the first place.â€
“When we have chips at the seaside and I run out of ketchup I like to go round dipping them in other people’s. I call it crowd saucing.â€
“The marketing department said we needed to be more disruptive, so I dropped the production database and deleted all the source code.â€
“Our product doesn’t have a road map, it has a star map. Each release depends on whatever new shiny thing the developers become infatuated with next.â€
“We’ve recently started using CRC cards. We now add a 32-bit checksum to each user story to stop the product owner messing with it mid-sprint.â€
“Our Scrum Master is forever asking what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today, and what our impediments are. He’s a big fan of continuous interrogation.â€
“I’ve always been envious of the autonomy granted to James Bond, but I guess that’s what you get when you’re M-powered.â€
“Teams that refuse to do planning poker have really gone up in my estimation.â€
“I’ve always felt it’s important to allow slack time in a schedule. I mean, how else are you going to keep up with all the instant messages?â€
“The problem with people who are Prince certified is that they want to manage projects like it’s 1999.â€
“Someone recently told me there is a new build system written entirely in F#, but I reckon it’s just Fake news.â€
“I know he invented object-orientation, but was the Hexagonal Architecture also invented by Alan Key?â€
“Guido seemed somewhat subdued when I asked him about how the Python enhancement process was going, so I gave him a PEP talk.â€
“I recently went to see beauty and the beast; a system where the back-end was written in Python and the front-end in JavaScript.â€
“I once worked at an online china shop. The CEO said we needed to move fast and break things, so I hired a bull.â€
“The problem with Amazon’s Dynamo DB is that it stops working when they stop peddling it.â€
“Companies that securely store my important data in offsite data centres really get my back up.â€
“Vampires never use database replication as they can’t see their data in the mirror.â€
“The other day a sysadmin asked me what I was using to provision hardware; he said that he was using Terraform. I replied, ‘Application Form’.â€
“Whenever I provision some new hardware I like to do it in batches of a hundred. My motto is ‘infra-penny, infra-pound’.â€
“Calvin Klein once offered me a modelling contract but I had to turn it down when I discovered they still used Rational Rose.â€
“The other day I felt really uncomfortable after we had a massive disagreement about whether to use dashes or slashes to prefix our console app switches. I hate command line arguments.â€
“I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. When the code doesn’t compile due to warnings, I just pragma them out.“
“I reckon Vim should be classified as a Class A drug on the grounds that it’s impossible to quit.â€
“I’m pretty disappointed that my ZX81 based mule racing game keeps falling over. I guess I shouldn’t have called it 1K Donkey.â€
“Surely to create safe self-driving cars we first have to solve the Halting Problem?â€
“Never use someone that can’t write regular expressions to perform jobs interviews – they tend to be a bad judge of character.â€
“When Robocop eats breakfast in the morning does he use his cereal port?â€
“If you hit the Levis REST API twice, on endpoints they haven’t implemented, you’ll get a pair of 501’s.â€
“The last time my wife and I tried to plait my daughter’s hair concurrently it ended in dreadlock.â€
“Someone has been sending me tiny photos of my bank’s login page. I think I’m being subjected to a micro-fiching attack.â€
“The last time I hired a rowing boat I could turn left and turn right, but not move forwards or backwards. I reckon it must have had exclusive oars.â€
“I’ve always felt it’s important that my kids are well grounded so when they go to bed at night I attach a wire from their ear to the radiator.â€
[1] I also used this title for an “agile†focused routine at Agile in the City: Birmingham the month before. However the less said about this performance the better...