The Triangle Factory: A Perfect Metaphor for Shipping Workarounds
Description
A two-panel comic drawn in a simple, MS Paint style that satirizes engineering constraints. In the first panel, a factory conveyor belt produces red triangles. One figure, wearing a hard hat, says, 'management says we have to start making circles'. An engineer with glasses replies, 'but we only have a trianglemaker'. The manager figure responds, 'yeah, i dunno'. In the second panel, the engineer presents a hexagon composed of six red triangles and asks, 'how's this?'. The manager replies with resigned urgency, 'just ship it ffs'. The technical context is a powerful and widely relatable metaphor for software development under pressure. The 'trianglemaker' represents a legacy system, an existing API, or a restrictive framework that cannot easily fulfill a new business requirement ('making circles'). The engineer's solution - a hexagon made of triangles - is the quintessential technical workaround: it approximates the desired outcome using only the available tools. The manager's 'just ship it ffs' captures the universal pressure to meet deadlines, even with an imperfect solution, often leading to the accumulation of technical debt
Comments
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The hexagon is the MVP. The perfect circle is on the roadmap for V2, pending a full platform re-architecture that marketing has already sold as 'paradigm-shiftingly round'
We hot-glued six triangles into a “hexagonal circle,” relabeled the Jira as “adopt hexagonal architecture,” and management thanked us for the strategic innovation
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that every 'circle' in production is just six triangles in a trench coat, deployed on Friday at 4:59 PM with a comment that says '// TODO: implement actual circles when we get budget for a circlemaker'
When the product owner asks for OAuth2 but you only have a JWT library and a prayer - sometimes six triangles is close enough to a circle that nobody in the stakeholder meeting will notice the difference. Ship it, we'll refactor in Q3 (narrator: they never refactored in Q3)
Product asked for circles; legacy only makes triangles, so we used Composite+Adapter to glue six together, shipped a hexagon as the Minimum Viable Polygon, and logged the rest as geometry debt
Management demands event-driven circles, but with our polling triangle maker, here's hexagonal architecture via callbacks. Just ship it - observability will hide the edges
Spec says circle, tooling produces triangles; we delivered “hexagonal architecture” - six adapters around a void - and PM called it the MVP
TIE Fighter panels. Comment deleted
I know the pieces fit Comment deleted
A fun fact is that triangular holes are created by a rotating drill bit. https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/DrillingATriangularHole/ Comment deleted