And The Winner Is…

Back during the development of Strongspace, I sent out this email to the development team:

I’d like to laugh a little more when reading my dog of an inbox. So, I offer a prize to the most amusing, yet still functional and informative (judged purely by myself) SVN commit message between the start of Strongspace, and the day we go live with 1.0.

So far, the clear clear CLEAR leader is Marten with #431 “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay.”

Details of the prize are yet to be decided, but it will have a value somewhere between a candy bar and an Aeron chair, and am open to suggestions.

It certainly made for a much more entertaining read of the commit logs every day, and we had some really funny posts along the way. Most of them were very much private jokes that I wouldn’t expect others to laugh at, but here’s a selection any way:

  • “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay.”
  • “first cut of a ‘your credit card failed, you suck’ email”
  • “many many things I’d rather not discuss”
  • “actually do the change I talked about last time”
  • “Does anyone else find it disturbing that Jason came up with 99% of these swear words?”
  • “resetted? – ‘oh papa homer, you’re so learn-ed’”
  • “fix my last commit which could never have worked”
  • “Can we get an equal sign up in here!?”
  • “Removed the % from User bar graph. Motioned by Marten, seconded by Justin.”
  • “me and subversion sat down and talked things over”
  • “If this still doesn’t work, we’ll just ditch the damned feature ;)”
  • “hide user permissions stuff from account owner user edit—unlike MC Hammer, they can always ‘touch this’”
  • “not too elegant, but passable solution for a not too elegant, but passable browser named IE”
  • “I swear I just saw something move.”
  • “full spelig/grammer/puncshuation awdit”
  • “it’s not really called a ‘fix’ if it breaks the rendering in every other browser known to man”
  • “Resolves case #846—providing ‘resolve’ means ‘change the rules and doing whater I want’”
  • “What would Zeldman say?”
  • “Needs tarting up. Justin, that’s where you come in.”
  • “Caching Me, Caching You, There is Nothing We Can’t Do”
  • “Bad speling? That’s unpossible!”

Johan had a few in there that came a very close second, and Jason voted for my own “MC Hammer” message, but after much deliberation, I decided the award goes to Marten’s original #431 ode to Frank Sinatra. Call me sentimental, whatever.

Marten will soon be the proud owner of an iPod nano engraved with “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay”.

·:· Posted 23 November 2005, 00:44 by Justin French to TextPeople  |  

  1. congratulations to marten.

    it was a well played match.

    — Terrell Russell    23 November 2005, 04:11    #
  2. I remind me of those old tagline galore back when IBM was the Boogie Man. You do have a dinosaur touch’ :)

    — Jérémie    23 November 2005, 07:12    #
  3. The messages are hilarious! I like the last two lines, although the Frank Sinatra and MC Hammer were also laudable.

    — Online Wong PoKér Hu    23 November 2005, 08:21    #
  4. aaahh the memories these commit messages bring back!

    — johan    23 November 2005, 12:10    #


  5. — Marten Veldthuis    24 November 2005, 16:04    #
  6. You guys are nuts ;) At a previous company I was working at a couple of months ago we had quotes from Larry Wall, Rasmus Lerdorf, to lyrics to songs, to all sorts of random crap in commit messages.

    — Jacques Marneweck    24 November 2005, 16:52    #