Everything here is unserious on purpose. No lessons, no takeaways,... just the stuff that didn't fit anywhere else.
Jokes
- A watched build never finishes, and an unwatched one fails the moment you look away.
- There are only two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and
off-by-one errors.
- To
git commit is to send a message to a future self who will not remember writing it,
will not thank you for it, and will absolutely blame you for the bug three lines down.
- Every
TODO comment is a small, dated love letter to whoever inherits this file. That
person is also you, and you are not coming back for it.
- Sudo does not grant power. It grants the brief, false confidence that precedes most disasters.
- A README that says "self-explanatory" is a confession, not a description.
- The bug is never in the code you just wrote. It is always in the code you wrote at 2 a.m. six
months ago, signed with your name, denying everything.
- There is a special ring of hell for whoever named it
final_v2_FINAL_use_this_one.pptx,
and I am fairly sure it was me.
- "It works on my machine" is not a defense. It is a confession with better PR.
- DNS is not the cloud's plumbing. DNS is the cloud's nervous system, and it is always slightly
malfunctioning.
- The most dangerous phrase in engineering is "quick fix," followed closely by "just for now."
- Stack Overflow didn't teach me to code. It taught me to recognize my own questions from three
years ago, unanswered.
Philosophical Gibberish
- The cloud is just someone else's computer, the edge is just your computer pretending to be
important, and localhost is the only machine that has never lied to you.
- Somewhere, a cron job scheduled in 2019 is still running, and no one alive remembers why. Let it
run. It has earned tenure.
- A pointer does not point anywhere. It merely believes, with the full confidence of the recently
allocated, that somewhere is out there.
- Version control did not invent memory. It merely gave regret a timestamp.
- Every system is either well-documented or still loved by the person who built it. Rarely both.
- Entropy is just the universe's way of telling you that you should have written that test.
- A server is a small, hot box you pray to. A well-run infrastructure team is a priesthood that has
simply gotten better at pretending otherwise.
- To refactor is to admit, quietly and without apology, that the past version of you did their
best. That's usually enough.
- Latency is time's way of reminding your code that it, too, exists in physical space.
- The fastest way to make a system reliable is to stop touching it. The second fastest is to touch
it very, very carefully.