The CDC's Official Guidance on WIP Limits
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from a user named Amy (@amyis_trying), posted on April 9, 2021. The tweet cleverly co-opts the format of public health advisories prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The text reads: 'even if you're fully vaccinated the CDC still recommends finishing your current project before starting 12 new ones'. The humor lies in the juxtaposition of a serious public health authority (the CDC) with a deeply relatable developer struggle: the tendency to start numerous new side projects without completing existing ones, often referred to as 'shiny object syndrome.' For experienced developers, this is a witty commentary on context switching, project management, and the perennial challenge of maintaining focus in a field full of interesting new technologies and ideas
Comments
7Comment deleted
My git history is a graveyard of abandoned feature branches. The CDC can't save me; I need a hard WIP limit and a senior engineer to decline my PRs for 'distractions'
CDC notice to devs: finish the monolith extraction you’ve already half-done - otherwise the 12 new microservices will reach community spread long before your tracing pipeline
My GitHub profile is just a graveyard of repos with exactly one initial commit, each representing the 45 minutes between discovering a new framework and realizing I'd have to write documentation
This hits different when you realize your GitHub profile is basically a CDC non-compliance report: 47 repositories, 3 with more than 10 commits, and that 'revolutionary' framework you started last Tuesday is already gathering dust next to your blockchain-based todo app and the 'Rust rewrite' you swore would be different this time
CDC gets it: kicking off 12 epics before merging the current PR just breeds variants of unmerged hell
Even post-vax, the R0 of "quick pilots" in enterprise orgs is still >1; finish the current one before it mutates into 12 half-built microservices
Little’s Law still applies to humans: cranking WIP to 12 just linearly scales lead time to never