Originally written while I was at Wayfair, this was a team memes doc to help explain common memes among our Frontend Platform team at the time. I'm sharing this as a blog post because I reference it often enough, and maybe others could start documenting their internal memes more often too! Feel free to adopt one/some/all of these if you want!
Theres usually a number of recurring memes that our team seems to hold on to and we sometimes refer to during various meetings / discussions, this doc aims to capture some of those and describe what they mean so everyone knows what we mean!
First off, meme in this context is referring to:
... an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture ...
"Holding it wrong"
This is a reference to the early iPhone issues where users were tightly gripping their phones causing the cell antenna to short and resulting in really poor cell reception. See this for context.
We generally use this to mean that we're not using a tool/framework/pattern/etc the way that it was intended to be used. e.g. Using AsyncLocalStorage to pass values into server components in Next, and also pass values "back up" to express.
F.A.A.F.O. (Fuck Around and Find Out)
We use this to mean "we don't know, so experiment and learn".
e.g.
"Just try removing CPU limits for our HPA settings, FAAFO!"
Developer Caution
We use this as a general "excuse" of sorts for why it might take a while for changes to happen.
e.g.
"They had too much developer caution"
This originates from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMVQ30c7TcA
Speculative Generality
As I understand it, this originated from a former Wayfairian Evan Davis, who used it to call out times in development where you are jumping to making a solution overly generalizable.
e.g.
"We need to add in a queue system with a publisher and a subscriber in case we start supporting more clients!"
Cooking ("Let them cook" / "overcooked" / "undercooked")
This is effectively a direct reference to current slang.
- "Let them cook" - meaning let them work
- Example: "Let copilot cook"
- "Overcooked" - meaning someone over-engineered something
- Example: "They definitely overcooked with this implementation!"
- "Undercooked" - meaning it's been underbaked / not fully implemented
-
Example: "We undercooked our solution, we need to make it better"
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