A coworker, who is much more experienced and smarter than I, used the phrase “cargo-culted” the other day. Not knowing what the phrase meant, I decided that I’d look it up.

The following is a definition from Wikipedia.

Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. Cargo cult programming is typically symptomatic of a programmer not understanding either a bug they were attempting to solve or the apparent solution.

This serves as a reminder to me to do a better job of fully understanding an issue before trying to fix it.