It’s been said that the uncharted territories of the old maps were often marked with the ominous warning: “Here be dragons.” Perhaps apocryphal, the idea was that no one wandering into these unknown corners of the world should do so without being ready to battle a terrifying foe. Anything could happen in these mysterious regions, and often that anything wasn’t good.
Programmers may be a bit more civilized than medieval knights, but that doesn’t mean the modern technical world doesn’t have its share of technical dragons waiting for us in unforeseen places: Difficult problems that wait until the deadline is minutes away; complications that have read the manual and know what isn’t well-specified; evil dragons that know how to sneak in inchoate bugs and untimely glitches, often right after the code is committed.
