Developers enter their trade fizzing with untamed creative energy. They envision spending their days dashing out intricate algorithms that compile first time, developing creative applications that dazzle colleagues and users alike, before leaving the office each evening, with a swagger in their step, to work their new GitHub ‘side project’, which will one day soon become the startup that makes their name and fortune.

The world of work for a professional developer never quite matches this fantasy. Creative sprits are dampened by endless project meetings, justification documents, whiteboards and post-it notes. Development colleagues never seem quite as dazzled by their routines as they should be. Ops people slow progress to a crawl with concerns over the ‘security implications’ of said routines. End users persist in abusing it in unfathomable ways, and causing ‘bugs’.

To prevent such frustrations gnawing at the soul of the developer, we at Simple Talk find it lifts flagging spirits to express them through the medium of aphorism. Here’s a few of our current favorites:

1. The application was a complete success; the users were a total failure
2. IT managers are not quite human, but then who is?
3. Everyone wants to be like Linus Torvalds. Heck, even Linus does.
4. Not everyone works in an office, especially the IT managers.
5. Never achieve the impossible as a developer; it will be added to your list of regular tasks.
6. All database deployments are easy until you have to do one.
7. Don’t worry what others think of your code. Nobody thinks about your code
8. We used to say “yes we can“, until we introduced Kanban and now we can’t any more.
9. The sooner we start coding, the longer a project seems to take
10. Just when we think our software is foolproof; the universe produces a bigger fool
11. Improving the UX of the application was like polishing the fish knives on the Titanic
12. The application hasn’t been deployed, it has merely escaped into production.
13. It is amazing how long it takes to write any application other than the one you are working on.
14. IT managers get where they are by hard work; often somebody else’s.
15. Anything in your application that is configurable will soon need to be reconfigured.
16. Whenever you think that the world is moving too fast, why not just put in a change request?

Let’s hear your suggestions for the aphorisms that most aptly express the current state of development life.