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brillant

Being incompetent, having a grossly inflated sense of one's competence, and possibly being lazy too, with the result being a very bad (or non-working) design or implementation. Often used in conjunction with the name "Paula". Originates from a post on The Daily WTF (an online forum discussing examples of bad programming practices) where a lazy programmer named Paula had coded exactly five lines of Java for a major project in several months and had managed to bullshit her way through weekly meetings regarding her progress. One of the lines was:

private String paula = "Brillant";

whose sheer elementariness, inappropriateness in production code, narcissism and self-inflation, with a weird spelling for "Brillant" on top of everything else, was deemed memorable.

"Have a separate table for each customer instead of a field in a single table? That's brillant!"

by AnonGoat May 30, 2006

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