A joke. A reality. A shared developer trauma now with AI and Ruby flavor.
Every industry has its running jokes. Lawyers have billable hours. Doctors have unreadable handwriting. Accountants battle ancient spreadsheets.
Developers?
We have two immortal bosses at the end of every level:
1. Naming things
2. Cache invalidation
These aren’t just memes.
They’re universal rites of passage, the kind of problems that don’t care about your stack, your years of experience, or your productivity plans for the day.
And as modern as our tools get, these two battles remain undefeated.
1. Naming Things: A Daily Existential Crisis
You would think building multi-region distributed systems or designing production-grade blockchains is harder than deciding how to name a method.
But no.
Naming is where confidence goes to die.
There’s something profoundly humbling about:
- Typing
data, deleting it, - typing
result, deleting it, - typing
payload, staring at it, deleting it again, - then settling on something like
final_sanitized_outputand hoping future-you understands the intention.
Naming = Thinking
A name isn’t just a word.
It’s a miniature problem statement.
A good name answers:
- What is this?
- Why does it exist?
- What is it supposed to do?
- Is it allowed to change?
- Should anyone else touch it?
A bad name answers none of that but invites everyone on your team to ping you on Slack at 22:00 asking “hey what does temp2 mean?”
Not being a native English speaker? Welcome to the Hard Mode DLC
For those of us whose brain grew up in Croatian or Slovenian, naming in English is a special kind of fun.
You might know exactly what you want to say in your own language, but English gives you:
- three misleading synonyms,
- one obscure word nobody uses,
- and a fourth option that feels right but actually means “a small marine snail.”
Sometimes you choose a word that sounds good.
Later a native speaker reviews it and politely suggests:
“Did you mean something else?”
Yes.
I meant something else.
I just didn’t know the word.
And every developer from Europe, Asia, or South America collectively understands this pain.
2. Cache Invalidation: “Why is my app showing data from last week?”
Caching seems easy on paper:
Save expensive data → Serve it fast → Refresh it when needed.
Unfortunately, “when needed” is where the nightmares begin.
Cache invalidation is unpredictable because it lives at the intersection of:
- time
- state
- concurrency
- user behavior
- background jobs
- frameworks
- deployment pipelines
- the moon cycle
- your personal sins
You delete the key.
The stale value still appears.
You restart the server.
It refuses to die.
You clear your browser cache.
Nothing changes.
Then you realize:
Ah. It’s Cloudflare.
Or Redis.
Or Rails fragment caching.
Or your CDN.
Or… you know what, it doesn’t matter anymore. You’re in too deep.
3. “But can’t AI fix it?”
Not… really.
Not even close.
Large language models can:
- produce suggestions,
- generate name variations,
- summarize logic,
- help brainstorm alternative wording.
But they don’t actually understand your domain, your codebase, your long-term architecture, or your internal conventions.
Their naming suggestions are based on statistical patterns in text not on:
- business logic
- your future plans
- subtle behavior differences
- what will still make sense in six months
- what your teammates expect
- what your product owner actually wants
AI might suggest a “good enough” name that reads nicely,
but it won’t know that half your system expects a value to mean something slightly different, or that “order” conflicts with another concept named “Order” in a separate context.
And with cache invalidation?
AI can generate explanations but it can’t magically deduce your system’s lifetime, caching layers, or deployment quirks.
It cannot predict race conditions or magically detect all the hidden layers where stale data might be hiding like a gremlin.
AI helps you write code faster.
But it does not remove the need for deep understanding, consistent thinking, and human judgment.
4. How Ruby Tries to Save Us From Ourselves
Ruby and Ruby on Rails in particular has spent two decades trying to soften the blow of both naming and system complexity.
Not by solving the problem completely, but by making the playground safer.
Ruby’s Naming Conventions = Guardrails for Humans
Ruby tries to push developers toward sanity through:
- clear method naming idioms (
predicate?,bang!,_before_type_cast) - consistent pluralization rules
- convention-driven file names and classes
- ActiveRecord naming patterns like
User→users,Person→people
Rails developers don’t choose how to name directories, controllers, helpers, or models.
Rails chooses for you.
This is not a limitation it’s freedom.
The fewer decisions you have to make about structure, the more mental energy you save for meaningful names, not framework boilerplate.
Ruby Reduces the “Naming Chaos Budget”
Thanks to convention-over-configuration:
- folders behave predictably
- classes match filenames
- methods follow community patterns
- model names map directly to database entities
- you don’t spend half your day wondering where things live
Ruby doesn’t fix naming.
It simply reduces the size of the battlefield.
Ruby Also Softens Caching Pain… a Bit
Rails gives you:
- fragment caching
- Russian doll caching
- cache keys with versioning (
cache_key_with_version) - automatic key invalidation via ActiveRecord touch
- expiry helpers (
expires_in,expires_at) - per-request cache stores
- caching tied to view rendering
Rails tries to help you avoid stale data by structuring caching around data freshness instead of low-level keys.
But even then…
The moment you have:
- multiple services,
- background jobs,
- external APIs,
- or anything distributed…
Ruby smiles kindly and whispers:
“You’re on your own now, my friend.”
Why These Problems Never Disappear
Because they aren’t technical problems.
They are human constraints on top of technical systems.
- Naming requires clarity of thinking.
- Caching requires clarity of system behavior.
- AI can assist, but it cannot replace understanding.
- Ruby can guide you, but it cannot decide for you.
The tools help.
The frameworks help.
AI helps.
But at the end of the day, the two hardest problems remain hard because they require the one thing no machine or framework can automate:
your own reasoning.
Final Thoughts
Some days you ship incredible features.
Some days you wage war against a variable name.
Some days you fight stale cached data for three hours before realizing the problem was a CDN rule from 2018.
And every developer, everywhere on Earth, understands these moments.
Naming things and cache invalidation aren’t just computer science problems.
They’re reminders of why software development is deeply human full of ambiguity, creativity, and shared misery.
But honestly?
That’s what keeps it fun.