Code in the Household: How Being a Software Developer Couple Changed Our Family Vocabulary

Let’s be honest, software development isn’t confined to the office or your code editor. It seeps into every aspect of your life. Especially when you’re in a household where both partners are software developers. Trust me, we’ve debugged our way through parenting and even optimized our dishwashing algorithm. Imagine a world where tech jargon becomes the family’s native tongue, like us updating from Python 2 to 3 but with more laughter and fewer breaking changes.

Take my almost-adult son, for instance. He can be as relentless as a while-loop without an exit condition when it comes to upgrading his phone. “Son,” I had to finally declare, “you’re a while-loop in need of a ‘break’ statement. Change your conditions, or you’re stuck in this loop forever.” And if his elder brother ever dares to ask for permission to go to a late-night party during school days? Let’s just say that conversation becomes a complex algorithm of if-else conditions and switch-case statements.

Ever wondered why things go missing in a household? We blame the “Garbage Collector.” Missing socks or vanishing Tupperware, all the Garbage Collector’s handiwork.

At the grocery store, my spouse and I often find ourselves in a real-world “merge conflict,” both of us having picked up duplicates from our separate shopping lists. No need for a git — abort; the extra items go back on the shelf — unless it’s chocolate; you can never have too many branches of that.

And when life throws you a curveball, like losing a credit card or an important letter, that’s a “404 error, item not found.” On the topic of feedback, kids could really use some HTTP status codes. Like when my son doesn’t respond to dinner calls, I can’t help but think his feedback loop is buggy, leaving me wishing I could raise a ticket with a Service Level Agreement attached.

As for household chores, our Roomba’s erratic movements sometimes make me want to check its logs for failed deployments. Speaking of logs, my son’s messy room is a blatant cry for a cache cleaning. “Whoa, looks like someone needs to clear their cache. This room’s lagging in performance,” I often find myself saying.

But here’s the twist: My son, who’s learning computer science, has started turning the tables. He now uses tech jargon to explain his real-world problems. Like the time he described his struggle with a calculus problem as a “stack overflow issue,” or attributed his grumpy mornings to a “502 Bad Gateway.” Even family outings have become exercises in load balancing, according to him.

So there you have it. Our family has developed its own SDK, complete with internal APIs for communication and an array of bugs we have no intention of fixing. All in a day’s work, or should I say, a day’s code?