Tonight I attended the Perth ALT.NET group and wrote part of the code in the Domain Driven Design Dojo (DDDD). As this code was to illustrate DDD principals only and never intended for production it exhibited a number of properties that real production code should not. This included little validation, static global types to supply dependencies and a repository that was backed by an in-memory collection. One notable piece was the InvalidOperationException I had the code throw on one particularly significant error. This had the highly informative message of “Die Hippie Scum”. This is not the type of message that would ever be acceptable in production code.

Regardless of the care you take to protect your users from errors at some point something will propagate up or out of the system to be seen by those for whom it was not intended. When this happens its generally a good idea if what is seen is not something that will get you fired. Additionally attempts at humour (and anyone who knows me knows that attempts are the best I can generally hope for) carry no information and are essentially waste when dealing with issues. No matter how funny you think your remark is you’re unlikely to still consider it as amusing at 3am when everything has collapsed and you desperately need to resolve the issue before it causes your employer to go out of business (this is generally a situation to be avoided of course). Keep lame humour where it belongs, in instant messenger conversations with your co-workers.