There Are Bugs in the Gonis

A former colleague of mine once shared a picture of some sentences that one of his wife's student's had written. The student was a very young kid with very young kid handwriting and the sentences were funny and we all had some laughs at how cute they were.

One of the sentences was partly incomprehensible. As far as we could tell it looked like it said "There are bugs in the gonis." For some reason this was hilarious to us and because we all wrote software for a job we began to use the word "gonis" to refer to any complex, old or difficult-to-work-with piece of code: it's where bugs come from.

I don't work there anymore. Neither does that colleague. And his wife no longer teaches those hilarious kids. But not a week goes by that I don't find myself at my new job wishing I could call some file or system a gonis.

So I figured I would write this little story. That way I can just use the word freely and hope that people drop it into a search engine and find this.

2021-03-09