Membership
The Society welcomes developers at every stage of their journey into principled inefficiency. Dues are payable by cheque, postal order, or an in-person explanation of why you believe dues should be automated.
For developers beginning to question whether things should be easy.
| Benefit | Notes |
|---|---|
| Official ASS badge | Shipped flat. Assembly instructions oral. |
| Monthly newsletter | PDF, scanned from the printed original. |
| Introduction to manual boilerplate | Self-paced. Heavily paced. |
| Permission to complain about frameworks | Non-transferable. |
For experienced developers who have written at least one internal implementation of JSON parsing. Evidence required; the parser need not work on nested arrays.
| Benefit | Notes |
|---|---|
| Certificate suitable for office walls | Frame sold separately, and locally. |
| Access to the private mailing list | Majordomo. Unsubscribing is a rite of passage. |
| Right to say "that's not real engineering" | Twice per sprint equivalent. |
| Priority placement in architecture meetings | Speaking time uncapped. |
Applicants must maintain a critical production component that nobody else understands. The Society will verify this by asking a colleague to explain it. Their silence is your application.
| Benefit | Notes |
|---|---|
| Lifetime job-security assumptions | Assumptions only. See LEGAL. |
| Emergency phone calls during holidays | Guaranteed. |
| Authority to reject pull requests as "too clever" | Also "not clever enough". Rotates. |
| Exemption from writing documentation | Grandfathered from previous exemption. |
Invitation only. The Society does not solicit Legacy Fellows; it discovers them, usually during an outage.
Indicative criteria:
- Preferred editor has no mouse support, on principle and by default.
- At least one production system depends on a Perl script whose original purpose is contested.
- Has postponed retirement because "nobody else knows how billing works." This is true, and is the problem.
- Refers to containers as "chroot with marketing."
Print this page. Complete it in ink. Post it to the Society's registered address, which is available on request from a current member. There is no online form. There will be no online form. The absence of the form is the first examination.
Upon admission — or in confident anticipation of it — members prepare their own Certificate of Membership. Preparing it before acceptance is presumptuous, and noted, and traditional.
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