Where to find it
As far as I can tell, https://noidea.dog/glue is the original. These days, if you search for “being glue in software engineering,” (or similar) you’ll come up with plenty of other articles, but as far as I can tell, Tanya Reilly coined the phrase.
What’s it about?
The struggles of doing the difficult, often thankless part of software engineering—people work.
Tanya does a great job at describing the problem “glue work.” If you’ve been there, you acutely know it already. The good news is Tanya also shows the light at the end of the tunnel.
I won’t attempt to summarize her article here, but if you’re a software engineer who spends more time doing important things that aren’t writing code, do yourself a favor and read this article.