Casually Hiding an Absurd Technical Joke from the Team
Description
This meme uses the two-panel 'Whatcha Got There?' format from the TV show iCarly. In the top panel, two characters, Carly and Sam, are looking suspiciously at someone off-screen. They are labeled 'my team, a bunch of normal people' and are asking, 'Um...whatcha got there?'. In the bottom panel, the character Spencer, labeled 'Me', is nervously holding a smoothie while hiding a full-sized ostrich behind his back. The ostrich is labeled 'The reference information is RFC 1149', and Spencer is lamely trying to deflect suspicion by saying, 'A smoothie.'. The humor is derived from knowing that RFC 1149 is a famous April Fools' Day Request for Comments, a joke standard for transmitting Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams on avian carriers (i.e., carrier pigeons). The meme perfectly captures the feeling of a developer who has gone down a rabbit hole of obscure, humorous, or impractical technical trivia and is now trying to play it cool in front of their more serious-minded colleagues
Comments
11Comment deleted
Hey, when the client says they need a solution with 'high latency, packet loss, and low throughput,' you have to explore all the options in the specification
“Marketing wanted ‘zero-carbon, serverless messaging at petabyte scale,’ so I shipped them an RFC 1149 coop and called it ‘Kafka on Wings.’”
The beauty of RFC 1149 is that it has better packet loss recovery than UDP - you just wait for the pigeon to come home. Though the latency is terrible, at least you don't have to worry about BGP hijacking unless someone literally hijacks your birds
RFC 1149 has better latency than some enterprise message queues I've worked with, though the packet loss during migration season is concerning. At least when it fails, you can actually see the bottleneck circling overhead instead of debugging distributed tracing spans for three hours to discover someone set a 30-second timeout on a synchronous HTTP call in a microservice six hops deep
Team: smoothie. Me: RFC 1149 demo - avian carriers with 256-byte MTU, perfect for lossy networks
When asked about our messaging bus, I cite RFC 1149 - eventual consistency, zero egress fees, and catastrophic packet loss during hawk migrations
If your runbook cites RFC 1149, your RTO is measured in molting seasons
For the lazy ones, here is the standard: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149 Comment deleted
And for the hot drinks: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7168 Comment deleted
3Com even made a LAN/WLAN kettle for workgroups... (Just kidding, it's a Wi-Fi bridge actually: 3CRWE83096A.) Comment deleted
IPoAC 😍 Comment deleted