Network Automation Optimism Ages Into Lighthouse Keeper Despair
Description
A two-panel Willem Dafoe meme contrasting youthful enthusiasm with weathered exhaustion. The left panel shows Dafoe in color, crouching by a sunny harbor in a bright blue tracksuit, red beanie, and sneakers, captioned 'I love network automation!'. The right panel is a black-and-white still of Dafoe as the grizzled, bearded lighthouse keeper from 'The Lighthouse', standing in a naval cap and coat before a lighthouse, captioned 'Just three hundred more lines of code and this show command for one switch will be fully automated'. The humor targets network engineers who discover that automating even a single trivial 'show' command on one switch spirals into endless scripting, screen-scraping vendor CLI output, and edge-case handling, transforming bright-eyed optimism into salt-crusted madness
Comments
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Network automation: where you spend 300 lines of Python to avoid typing 'show interface' twice - and the regex still breaks on the next firmware update
The command took five seconds manually, so naturally we spent a sprint making it idempotent.