Lambs Born in April

Pastures which are subject to overflow should be avoided. All lambs born in April or May should be drenched about August or September following, to be certain of ridding them of worms that may later cause their death.

This is output from a tool I built called Veterinary Ipsum. It's something I've created a few times: a Lorem Ipsum generator specific to my company's business domain.

Lorem Ipsum is placeholder text used to communicate the design of a document. If you've ever seen website copy like "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet", that's Lorem Ipsum.

It's supposed to help us focus on the design, but I often find it distracts me from the design. As engineers, we generate our own Lorem Ipsum to fill in fields while building or debugging. I've noticed that the placeholders I choose reflect what I'm doing. When I'm heads-down, I'll use the programmer's standby "foo bar". When demoing, I'll use "Testing the form!" When trying to be mindful, I'll type "The dog is healthy", parroting our staff.

I wrote Veterinary Ipsum to automate this for me. Here's some example output:

$ ~/veterinary-ipsum
This is accomplished by the heart forcing to the lungs the impure blood with its impurities collected from all parts of the body and also the nutriment collected from the digestive tract.

Veterinary nonsense, at least to me, on demand. Pipe it to pbcopy and paste it anywhere.

Here's the code:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

FARMER = File.read('the-farmers-veterinarian.txt')
HORSESHOE = File.read('a-text-book-of-horsehoeing.txt')

class VetIpsum
  def self.generate_paragraph
    sentences = FARMER.split('.').map(&:strip).reject(&:empty?)
    sentences += HORSESHOE.split('.').map(&:strip).reject(&:empty?)
    "#{sentences.sample(rand(1..3)).join('. ')}."
  end
end

puts VetIpsum.generate_paragraph

As you can see, this Ruby shell script loads two public-domain books about veterinary science into memory: The Farmer's Veterinarian: A Practical Treatise On The Diseases Of Farm Stock (1909) by Charles William Burkett and A Text-Book of Horseshoeing, for Horseshoers and Veterinarians (late 19th century) by A. Lungwitz. It then combines a few sentences into a paragraph.

The vintage clinical language and imprecise domain overlap (my company doesn't treat livestock) keeps the output interesting. I could make it more precise with puppy and kitten terminology if I wanted to. But the slight weirdness is a feature, because I know when I see such copy that I, and not a colleague, created it.

Why spend time building this? First, it's fun. But more importantly, it makes my testing better. Software should be stressed realistically, and often, and we engineers are too easy on our software. We pick the safe path in our demos. We do the thing we need to do in testing and nothing more. We try to avoid finding bugs. Using realistic data addresses this weakness.

I've written about this idea a few other times, in different ways:

• Prefer Real Data
• Better Than Foo

One more quote for the road:

The shoe shows "grounding" wear at ends of branches, and "swinging-off" wear at toe. One of these is width between the eyes. The colt should be placed in clean, airy, and comfortable quarters, but not in a draft.