Comment by BitwiseFool
5 years ago
We're actually working on a collection of such stories internal to our division. We've found that these tales are a great way of helping people understand the complexities and quirks of our nearly 3 decade old code base.
I think story telling is an underrated technique in our profession.
In all projects there are coding rules (like "make destructors noexcept"). A rule sticks much better if you also tell a story about some debugging caused by not following the rule.
I worked at a place one that had a style guide for the main front-end language used with links to terrible things that had happened as a result of breaking the style guides rules.
It was surprisingly effective, so I completely agree with you on the story-telling.