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Here is the thing. If you have a Convention Manual which calls for a certain color for bike sheds, then you use that. Failing that, if you have several other bike sheds of a certain color, then that's what you use, for consistency with existing bike sheds.

The color of the bike shed only doesn't matter if it's the only bike shed, and there is no documentation which has already settled the matter.

“Bikeshedding” is one of my favorite terms I’ve learned since becoming a programmer :)

Why can’t a site like this be reformatted so the text is viewable on mobile (at proper size)

It's incredible how "old-timey" the writing feels, even as someone who was online at that time.

Does anyone have a reference to the original thread or issue about sleep(1)?

way to shoot your own point in the head by making it unreadable and posting it a billion times ptui

Reminds me of a story a friend related a long time ago about how to manage bosses. That probably applies to bike sheds.

The general idea is to introduce a glaring mistake into any proposal you make. Then the boss (or whoever feels like bikeshedding) can "catch" that mistake upon which you congratulate them on their infinite wisdom, fix the mistake, and the project can move along.

So to avoid the bikeshed color discussion, just do something totally stupid, like not have a roof, or a wall, then the nit-pickers will comment on that, you can quickly "address their concerns" and proceed to have a bike shed of any color you want.

This article has been shared at least 10 times before on HN over the last decade. Amazing to see people organically find it over the years.

See also a rebuttal of sorts [1] from Brett Glass, the sole programmer singled out by name in phk's essay:

> Poul-Henning's assertion that all such ideas should be dismissed as "bikeshedding" reflects this dismissive attitude, which can be just as damaging to a software project as taking too many suggestions (or accepting bad ones). At the time of the discussion I mention above, internal squabbles drove several talented programmers from the project, and I was discouraged from becoming more deeply involved in it. FreeBSD was falling behind Linux in features and in popularity. While it has now caught up in terms of technology, it remains an underdog. This is, in part, due to the developers' dismissal as "bikeshedding" of good ideas that Linux adopted much earlier.

[1] http://bikeshed.info/

Wrong URL; it should be https://blue.bikeshed.com/

Or perhaps https://steelblue.bikeshed.com/ .

(For those who haven't seen, the site accepts any CSS color as a subdomain.)

How delightful, if you click on the picture of the shed it changes the background color of the page and the shed since it's a png with transparent pixels over the shed walls.

> it is about being able to point somewhere and say "There! I did that."

This doesn't explain much since you can do that without personally arguing about the colors

We are happy to be providing this public service :-). I wish the term were better known outside tech; it's useful in so many contexts.

(1999)

Just be careful. Paint is very important on a bike shed. If you spend too long arguing you will end up with the weather destroying your bike shed. This was the point, but it is missing something critical.

Color is important even though it serves to objective purpose. Some colors blend in well making an ascetic whole neighborhood better - but even that way can go too far and you get a monotonous mono-tone which is worse than clashing colors! There is - and can be - no agreement on what is best (I'm color blind: I can see colors but not the same way most people do and so even if there was some objective perfect - it would still be different for me vs normal people), but we should spend some time figuring out colors.

The important thing is to give everyone time to think, then express their opinion in a way that everyone else listens to understand (as opposed to listen to rebut) and then we come to a good compromise - understanding letting someone else win is often the best compromise - things like meeting in the middle can be worse!