Here Be Dragons
In a recent post on our unofficial and informal work blog, Institutional Knowledge I used the phrase "here be dragons." When Scott saw it, he gave me that look to indicate that a) I had horns growing out of my skull or b) he, as usual, had no clue what I was talking about. So, I thought I would do a little digging.
The first instance I remember reading was on Mark Pilgrim's excellent post on thwarting the bad actors of the internets from abusing your site and bandwidth. He uses it in reference to Apache's Rewrite functionality. Now, Mark is a sharp guy, but he probably didn't come up with that himself. He's too snarky for that. So, off to google I went and what did I find but more snark!
That English mapmakers formerly placed the phrase "here be dragons" at the edges of their known world has somehow become general knowledge... and here is the list of all known historical maps upon which these words appear:
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Get it? It's an empty list. Har har. But, at least I know I was using it in the proper context now.
Crazy. Like two weeks ago, I'd been in a meeting where I was taking notes and in a section of my notes about a particularly nasty portion of the architecture we were discussing I'd surrounded it with a box and labeled it as "Here be dragons". Later, in another meeting, someone asked me to copy my notes from that previous meeting and hand them out to the group, which generated lots of "What's this about dragons?" questions, so I had to explain this whole map reference thing to them. :)