Dev writes comments as limericks and other coding secrets

An anonymous developer has admitted to writing comments in code as limericks.

The confession can be found at codingconfessional.com, a site devoted entirely to divulgements of developers' depravities.

Here, for example, is the limerick chap's work:

“I write most comments in limerick It makes all my coworkers sick My comments are fine (And mostly they rhyme!) But my scrum master thinks I'm a dick.”

A staple on the site is comments about fooling the boss, such as this one:

“Last night we estimated a task for 2 work days. I finished it in 2 hours this morning. I fully intend to slack at least the whole of today, before telling anyone I finished ahead of schedule, and move to the next task. And I'm paid per hour.”

Of course the site has a Twitter feed, which spits out gems like this:

I wrote a crawler that parsed Craigslist for email addresses and released it for free. Sorry for all the spam.

— Coding Confessional (@codinconfession) April 16, 2013

Immature japery is another common theme:

“Whenever I have a queue of files I prefix the field names FQ: because it sounds a bit rude and apparently I'm very immature.”

Many confessions offer a window into the writer's soul:

“I used to work for startups, mobile and gaming companies doing challenging interesting work. I'm staying at a crappy boring 'enterprise' .NET job that's stable an high paying because of my family, but I'm worried my skills atrophying while the rest of the world moves on.”

You'll also find many unusually frank admissions:

“Sometimes, I have a hard time figuring out if an old piece of my code is tremendously elegant or flat wrong. It usually works, but I have no idea why.”

Others get a little more creepy:

“I was a victim of police brutality where they left me out in the woods, for me to walk for 4 hours in -10 degrees Celsius. This was 4 years ago and I have done everything in my power to ruin their lives online. Keyloggers, DDOS-attacks against their IPs, thousands of microtransactions from foreign countries, etc.”

Ohhhhh … kay. Everyone needs a hobby and that chap seems to have found one.

So has this developer:

“Once I was hired to maintain a church's web page. I wrote satanic messages as comments in the HTML. I also was planning to create a satanic version of that web page to be shown to visitors with a probability of 1/100,000, but unfortunally [sic] I quitted the job before finishing this project.”

Here's another that caught our eye:

“I once mentored a co-worker in programming; he used the new skills to write email-address harvesters and build ad-banner sites for domain squatting.”

That's gratitude for you.

Thanks can also be earned on the site, as each confession posted is subject to an upvote/downvote system that offers readers the chance to condemn or absolve posters.

Whether it's safe to post or vote is another matter entirely. The site has no “about” information, no privacy policy and a whois trail that leads to developer Ryan Epp, who says on his LinkedIn profile that he whipped up the site over a weekend.

He's also popped a 65-line ASCII art version of the site's Favicon into the comments on the page, as if to prove the medium is the message. ®