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Post #2575 · source on Telegram
Programmer's Choice: Unfinished Projects Over Dating
Description
A two-panel meme illustrating a common developer stereotype. The first panel uses the 'Two Buttons' meme format, presenting a choice between a red button labeled 'New project that will remain unfinished' and a blue button labeled 'Having a girlfriend'. A finger is shown hovering over the blue button but ultimately moving towards the red one. The second panel shows the character Dr. Robotnik from the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, labeled 'Programmers', gleefully and emphatically slamming the red button. The joke satirizes the tendency for programmers to get excited about starting new side projects, often at the expense of their social or romantic lives, even with the self-aware knowledge that these projects will likely be abandoned
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My GitHub is a graveyard of brilliant ideas, each one a monument to a weekend I could have spent dating. At least the READMEs are immaculate
Every quarter I add “start dating” to my personal OKRs, immediately spin up another half-baked Rust CLI, mark the relationship epic as WONTFIX, and call it agile prioritization
The real relationship status of senior engineers isn't 'single' or 'taken' - it's 'in a committed polyamorous relationship with 47 half-finished GitHub repos, each promising to revolutionize something but actually just reimplementing a todo app with the framework-of-the-week.'
Every senior engineer knows the real technical debt isn't in the codebase - it's the 47 half-finished side projects in your GitHub repos, each representing a weekend where you chose 'learning Rust/Go/Zig' over human interaction. The red button isn't just a choice; it's a lifestyle where your commit history is more active than your dating profile, and your most committed relationship is with your IDE's dark theme
Of course we hit “new repo” - it has zero stakeholders, instant dopamine from git init, and trivial rollback; relationships demand strong consistency, 24/7 SLOs, and a PR that never closes
Smash the “new side project” button - loose SLAs, eventual consistency, and a perpetual 0.1.0‑alpha means no Sev-1s when it never ships
Wise architects know: the ultimate sunk cost fallacy is starting another cathedral project you'll never finish
Ha ha classic Comment deleted