During a hallway conversation at CodeMash a few of us were telling war stories and/or fish tales about some of the coding horrors we’d seen over our careers.
At one point the conversation was focused on code churn and compulsive refactoring. And then suddenly, without warning, I blurted out a single word that caused the entire discussion to screech to a halt.
That word: refactorbation.
When I looked around I saw a smile on nearly every face, but could tell that no one knew what I was talking about.
And why would they... I didn’t even know what I was talking about - it was just a word that seemed to fall out of my mouth as a matter of reaction rather than thought.
Refactorbation, WTF is that?
I believe I defined it something like
re·fac·tor·ba·tion - [re-fak-ter-bey-shuhn]
–noun
- To compulsively refactor code for no other reason than to fulfill your own desires to refactor
Hilarity ensued and the conversation quickly fell off the rails and devolved into beer and fart jokes. It was awesome!
Later, Brian and some of the other guys told me I needed to introduce this new found term into the developer lexicon via a blog post. However, while writing this very post I did a little research and it turns out I may not be the lexical genius I thought I was.
Am I just a copy cat?
The clever folks over at Codesqueeze have a post on Refactorbation from mid 2007. Maybe I read that post at some earlier date and then forgot? Oh, or maybe great minds really do think alike!
Who knows. Either way, I like their definition better and I’m prepared to get them credit. :)
re·fac·tor·ba·tion - [re-fak-ter-bey-shuhn]
–noun
- To stimulate oneself through endless refactoring exercises towards unattainable perfection
Synonyms: codesterbation
Remember boys and girls, every time you refactorbate God kills an LOLCat.