I derailed myself a bit and got back into making Youtube videos. I'm spending way more time than is likely necessary making them weird and fun and informative.
My newest video is about implementing a world wrap game mechanic in Godot. In the video I complained about boilerplate code a few times and started wondering why it's called that, so here's what I found:
Back when old-timers were new-timers and news spread via something black and white and re(a)d all over, there were these things called printing presses. Organizations of writers and journalists called newspaper syndicates (apparently syndicate is a real word that isn't only used for supervillain groups) would send the printing press people big metal plates with their work engraved backward into them like giant stamps. These printing plates were usually made for work that was lower quality, like ads or filler columns. They were distributed to lots of newspapers and reused often.
These plates resembled metal plates used for creating boilers, unoriginally but aptly called boilerplates. I wasn't super confident in my definition of a boiler, so I looked that up too, and it's essentially a big cylindrical metal hull with water and pipes and fire inside that turns steam into useful versions of heat and power. People started referring to the printing plates from the syndicates as boilerplates, and because of the trite nature of the content, boilerplate became synonymous with a "unit of writing that can be used over and over without change." The term was widely used as early as 1887.
The term boilerplate is modernly used in law, marketing, public relations, and programming to refer to content that is repeatedly used with only minor changes. Boilerplate code can be incredibly useful and effective, but can also be annoying visual noise. I guess it's very similar to online ads in that way; mostly annoying and ignored, but occasionally terrifyingly effective at doing what it was designed to do.
Sources that wouldn't pass my college English teacher's references standard but that are good enough for me: Wiki, Online Etymology Dictionary, Investopedia, Wiki - Boiler