Developers and holidays. A weird relationship?

'tis the holiday season! Maybe you're coming or going home for the holidays. Whatever maybe the case, you rejoice the fact that you finally have a break from all the stuff that happened this year.

It doesn't matter how well this year went, what's important is that it's all over (Even if you don't want it to be!). We're developers and people say we are a special breed of people (Or so I've heard over the years!), and some of us (If not all!) are geeks (and some are even nerds!

But we don't like labels!) and we're proud of it. We wear this badge with pride even if people mock us for our enthusiasms when somebody makes a new discovery using CSS or does some crazy experiment with HTML5 (I'm looking at you Chrome Experiments!).

But what do developers like to do for the holidays? Well a certain comic strip comes to mind that can sum it up perfectly.

If you followed the link to the comic you'll know what I mean. Because of the social awkwardness that some of us have, we  don't actually know what else to do when the holiday season comes. I'm not saying we don't socialize, I'm just saying that we just prefer the company of other fellow developers over the medium of the interwebs. It's a lot more fun to just stay at home and figure out a way to add holiday cheer to all your apps and code, maybe with the help of your other fellow developers. You enjoy spending time figuring out a new way to create a Santa hat using just one div tag.

As Pablo points out in his comic, maybe you enjoy doing funny stuff to your blog, like adding some snow using CSS or a Santa hat to your logo using :before or :after.

These are stuff we enjoy doing and nobody can tell us different. But developers are humans and we do have families (and some of us even have girlfriends / boyfriends) and these families need some material compensation for putting up with our shit all year-long, that's why we like to do our shopping online and get it delivered to our doorstep.

We also like to order stuff for ourselves for the holidays because that's how we roll.

Usually our wishlist contains stuff like the latest in books for developers written by developers, some super expensive gadgets, that we're going to use a few weeks and then forget about it.

Ok, now that we're done with the shopping we start placing hints for other people to see what we want to receive for the holidays, even if we already got ourselves a whole bunch a stuff in the first places.

You may ask yourself at this point in the article, do developers actually celebrate something when the holiday season comes for the rest of the world? Well it's a good question, my dear friend. Because we are surrounded by all the technology and we have all the information available in the world at the bottom of our fingertips we have a certain point of view when it comes to the holidays.

We acknowledged the evolution theory, quantum physics and string theory but for some reason we still like to celebrate something that started out as a pagan ritual. On the other hand we don't like to acknowledged the existence of certain bearded figure because the numbers wouldn't add up and it would be practically impossible for anyone to perform such a feat of strength and endurance in a single night.

So, in order to wrap this up on a positive note, I would say that we as developers have a certain way of doing things, even when it comes to celebrating something. I wouldn't label it as weird, just different and it's a shame because so many people misunderstand this concept and start pointing fingers, but that's just the human race, we like to point stuff out if they are out of the ordinary.

That is all. Until next time (whenever that is!), code long, prosper and Happy Holidays!

Stefan