Out of Scope

Backstory

At this time I was an iOS developer. I knew Ruby, but also knew that I was out of my depth touching production Ruby code, especially having barely followed improvements to Ruby/Rails in the previous five years. There was a minor bug in the mobile API that the team responsible for it seemed unwilling to fix, so I took it upon myself to fix it for them. I created a fix, added some tests and submitted the pull request. The first comment was along the lines of “this is OK, but you should really have followed this pattern bla bla,” which firstly made me wonder why I’d even bothered helping that team out in the first place, and secondly would have led me into I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-doing territory, so I simply replied that any further refactor was out of scope.

Artist’s Notes

Is that an elephant’s trunk, or a worm coming out of a smiling face?