A Letter To Dev Santa, From A Mostly Naughty, But Often Nice Developer

Dear Dev Santa,

How are things at the north pole? I hope you and Mrs. Santa have good wifi reception, and that the elves aren’t driving you crazy with their electric scooters and kombucha tea.

I know that at this time of year you’re very busy going over Git Blame, trying to see which developers were naughty and which were nice. And I’m guessing it’s also a crazy time at the gift factory, designing Christmas-themed tech conference swag and candy.

I hope you don’t find too many of my bugs in Git Blame. I promise you that I really did try to stick by the coding guidelines whenever I could and that I accepted and applied all the comments I got during code review sessions.

You’re right, I did push a couple of risky changes just before leaving for the weekend, and yes, I guess you could argue that it really upset my team. And yes, I did give crazy high time estimates because I didn’t want to be pressured by a deadline. I also blamed all my bugs on the Frontend team, and somehow I was able to both write too many and not enough comments at the same time. But I really didn’t mean to!

I know I’ve made some mistakes, but I’ve also tried *really hard* to be a good developer. I attended ALL of the meetings my TL told me to. Even the ones about security and compliance which are booooooring. I always made sure my code has enough test coverage, and I never pushed something without testing it locally first. Plus, I always help my friends when they need a code review, or when they struggle with regular expressions. Always.

So I think that if you balance my git karma, the state of my Jira backlog, the number of coffee cups left on my desk, and my average resolution time on pager duty, you’ll find that I was more naughty than nice.

Is that how it works? Is it kind of like the point system in ‘The Good Place’? How can you handle the large volume of children and the constant revision of what is considered “nice”?

Are you using a Random Forest algorithm? If so, how do you assign variable importance? And which IDE are you using? I would love to have a look at your code when you drop by on Christmas.

Anyway, if your algorithm does determine that I was Nice, I really don’t need a big present. Maybe some soundproof headphones so I can focus on my work. Maybe a new coffee machine, or a foosball table. Or maybe just some peace and quiet.

Of course, if you could also make my code run faster and with fewer bugs, it would be a Christmas miracle. Then again, I do believe in Dev Santa…  🙂

See you soon,

Me