!rant

Customer: What's the difference between an antivirus and an antimalware?

Me: *thinks for a second* So an antimalware program is like if you're on a beach with a metal detector. You're looking around for metal that's already buried in the sand. An antivirus is like actively watching people for if they drop metal on the ground.

Customer: That's an interesting analogy.

Coworker: *quietly* That's a actually a really good analogy...

My boyfriend is in dental school and I am, of course, a dev. So we often swap analogies to help each other better understand what we are talking (or usually complaining) about. My favorite one so far is when I was explaining to him how the sales team undersells websites without consulting developers and we are constantly over budget. So he goes, "That's like the receptionist telling the patient they have 2 cavities just by looking at them and having them pay immediately. And when the dentist takes a look, the patient actually needs 4 crowns and a root canal... but they already paid for just the 2 cavities."

When I'm watching a news story about the tech industry or software development, I always wonder if people in other professions also scream at their TV when their field of expertise is butchered with bad analogies and half-truths by reporters and anchors.

CTO joined us to interview a web fullstack today.

Amongst many battle analogies, he said "Fuck the corrupt and the weak. We keep only the best here"

If he watches 300 a couple more times, I think he will start wearing leather underwear and a red cape to work.

Web development explained with butt analogies

Looking for next book to read:

*Googled "Mythical Man Moth"
*Realized that it auto corrected to "Mythical Man-Month"

Ever since I heard of the book I pondered what the hell the title could mean, thinking about analogies of devs to moths...

I've never felt so stupid and disappointed at the same time.

Duck typing is the equivalent of pulling the trigger to check if a gun is loaded

What’s your best answer to “how long will it take you to find and fix that bug?”

It drives me fucking nuts!
“I don’t know (ffs), could be ten minutes, could be ten weeks.” - that’s by default right know, but that’s not always appropriate.

You guys have maybe analogies that managers understand ?

Frontend and backend.

My manager asked me why would our server would get overloaded, after analysing the issue and giving him a technical analysis over the last N weeks.

So I used an analogy:

Imagine an empty tank. The water coming in comes through a giant hose where the output is like a tiny tap.

Then just now I was thinking how to explain the Node event loop... And thought of this analogy:

Imagine fireball Mario running around in a circular track throwing fireballs to the side as he runs.

Maybe not entirely true but got made me chuckle...

Does anyone else come up with these sorts of analogies to explain programming problems to "nonprogrammers"?

Just had the worst exam of my life today in system development at my university. This cock sucking bitch of a sensor claimed I was wrong in various assumptions about Extreme Programming. Such as: saying XP is an incremental process and not iterative. Claiming UP is more iterative than XP and that various analogies about what iterative means compared to incremental was wrong and even disrupting me while I was talking. Mind you I've been studying these subjects closely the last week and have been reading most of The Pragmatic Programmer to verify various things she disagreed upon. Result grade? In the middle of the fucking scale. Fuck this shit. I'm just glad the grade won't appear on my final graduation papers. And yes, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to this and programming, so if I'm in the wrong please correct me.

!rant
import analogies

Customer: So I have two emails and I'd like to be able to use them.

Me: Okay, I see you have both Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird...

Customer: Yeah, Thunderbird was the old one we used, we now use the Windows Live Mail, but it's always having problems.

Me: Well, Windows Live Mail isn't supported anymore, so I would recommend moving back to Thunderbird.

Customer: But that would mean I would have to get another email, right?

Me: No... *thinks for a moment* OK, imagine you have a garden hose that is connected to the main line of your house. You with me?

Customer: I guess...

Me: So the connection from your house is your email - or at least the server out on the internet. Now on the other end you have a hose splitter, and it splits off into two other hoses. Still with me?

Customer: Yeah...

Me: So on the end of the other two hoses you have two spray nozzles; one for each hose. Now one nozzle is from company A and the other is from company B. Both nozzles share some spray types on the heads, but there are a few heads on A that B doesn't have and vice versa.

Customer: OK...

Me: Those spray heads are Windows Live Mail and Thunderbird. They receive your mail from the same place, like the water, but they have different features. Does that makes sense?

Customer: I suppose.

If your company starts handing out a book called “What the heck is EOS?”, be afraid. Be very afraid.

It contains analogies like: there’s a table, sometimes seats get rearranged and there’s no seat for you. No seat = you’re getting laid off.

My last company gave out this book. They even sent it to people they had already laid off (but hadn’t reached their last day yet).

EOS = Entrepreneurial Operating System, in case you were wondering

A game taking place inside an operating system. Like Tron but needs to have much more solid analogies. User's body as tty process. Some representation of scheduler priority and memory allocation. Forking. Children and zombies. Init.

Some process-ownable token representing file handles.

Network ports as portals through which data may be sent by acquiring a file handle and using it.

/proc, /mem, etc are extreme stretch goals.

Never really started because I couldn't decide how to represent all the different parts so they would all be consistent *and* entertaining

As an extension of the extreme stretch goals, a multiplayer functionality where players can shell into each other's game worlds ("computers")

Does anybody have any good analogies for explaining the difference between frontend and backend?

I have been thinking about a possible keyboard analogy since a keyboard is very well understood these days. This only really works for membrane keyboards, but that's fine.

We can all guess where this is going. If you remove the keycaps from a membrane keyboard, you pretty much cannot use it unless you poke into the membrane with something else. So the keycaps are the frontend. They are generally labeled so you know what they do, they are organized into some form of layout which can vary even on a country-by-country basis, they may have pretty colors and they make it easier to interface with the backend. The backend is the rest and the users don't really have to know how it works, its just supposed to work.

For mechanicals, obviously, the removal of the keycaps means it becomes a shitty frontend that is not easy to use, but does have great potential.