The ark of programming

The ark of programming. Yes, ark, not art.

This is about the ark of programming and not the art of programming.

This post has a more humorous touch. You have probably heard of the famous "The art of programming" by Donald Knuth. If you don't have heard of it, you have to do your homework and look it up on the internet. I was inspired by this title when I was writing this post.

If you think about it, there are actually a lot of animals hiding in different software development metaphors. During the years as professional developer I have encountered several animals, I will present them all in my ark below.

Bug
Okay. Let's be honest. This may not be a real animal. However, it is a living thing. And it is not wanted on the ark as well as in the code.

Mouse
The mouse is so common, you don't really think about it. I've encountered different schools of mouse using. One school where you use graphical IDE's like Visual Studio, which mouse using is very common. The other school avoid the mouse totally. By using short commands with the keyboard, you don't get slowed downed by reaching the mouse each time you want to open a file, or search for a keyword.

Penguin
Do I need to say more? All Linux developers know what I mean, and probably the rest of you as well.

Python
A very well known programming language.

Bird/Owl
As a developer you can either be an early bird developer or a night owl developer. The first one implies that you are producing better code during the morning and the day, while the latter one implies you are producing better during late evening and nights. Which type are you?

Chicken
Among all weird programming languages, this one is one of the weirdest. The creator must really liked chicken. This language only has one symbol, chicken.

Duck
Do you own a duck? Of course I mean a rubber duck. The rubber duck is excellent if you want to discuss a problem without bothering your colleagues. Just talk to the duck!

Teddybear
Are you doing any pair programming? More specific, are you doing any teddybear pair programming? Teddy bear pair programming is just another way to talk to a mascot, just like the rubber duck. And no, teddybear is not an animal, but bear is.

Monkey
A code monkey is considered to be a skilled developer.

Pig/Chicken
During your daily Scrum, two types of members can be identified, the chicken and the pig. Pigs are totally committed to the project, while the chicken is only involved in the project.

Fox/Dog
Have you ever encountered the sentence; "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"? It is commonly used when testing encryption for cryptography as well as different text coding standards.

Swan
The black swan event is nothing you want to encounter. A black swan event is an unpredictable event that has a major negative affect on your project planning. It can make your organization or customer very unhappy.

Elephant
I'm sure you know that a string in C++ must be terminated with a NULL character. This character is called a sentinal value, but can also be called "the elephant in Cairo". A sentinal value is a value that ensure a loop or a data structure is terminated.

You are welcome to leave comments, complaints or questions!