The story
From custom + snowball, referencing the snowball effect, where a rolling snowball gathers mass and momentum. Coined to describe how a small deviation from a standard process gathers complexity.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
custom snowball
Today it means: A cascading chain reaction in which a single non-standard feature, modification, or workaround forces the creation of subsequent custom solutions to maintain compatibility, ultimately resulting in disproportionate complexity and technical debt. Full definition →