The Joy of Coding vs. The Avalanche of Everything Else
Description
A four-panel comic based on the 'Pillarmen' or 'Awaken, My Masters' meme format from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, illustrating a developer's typical day. In the first panel, a cheerful, green, box-like cartoon character labeled 'DEVELOPER' exclaims, 'I GET TO CODE!!' with musical notes in the air. The second panel introduces a giant, muscular, red humanoid figure labeled 'MEETINGS' looming menacingly. The third panel shows the 'MEETINGS' figure joined by a similarly muscular purple figure, which represents a list of other tasks: 'EMAILS', 'PROD FIRES', 'SECURITY TRAININGS', 'INTERRUPTIONS', 'DOCUMENTATION', 'DEPLOYMENTS', 'PULL REQUESTS'. In the final panel, both muscular figures are gleefully beating up the small developer character. The meme humorously captures the core frustration of many software engineers: the desire to engage in 'deep work' and write code is constantly thwarted by a barrage of meetings, administrative tasks, and urgent operational duties, leading to context switching and reduced productivity
Comments
8Comment deleted
The only thing that scales faster than our production services is the number of meetings required to discuss scaling our production services
My calendar is basically a Kubernetes node: Meetings hog all the CPU, prod fires spin up privileged pods, security drills add sidecars, and the one lonely container named “Actual Coding” keeps getting OOM-killed
The real distributed system challenge isn't CAP theorem - it's trying to maintain code consistency while your brain is partitioned across 47 different Slack threads, three production incidents, and a mandatory security training that could've been an email
The irony is that we've built asynchronous systems that can handle millions of requests per second, yet we still can't figure out how to let developers work asynchronously without scheduling synchronous meetings to discuss why our async processes aren't working. Meanwhile, that 'quick sync' just cost you two hours of flow state and the mental context of which microservice was throwing the 503
We practice MDD - Meeting‑Driven Development; per Little’s Law, with WIP=meetings and cycle time=email threads, throughput ≈ 0 LOC/sprint
Coding builds features; prod fires, PRs, and trainings build biceps - and that sweet SRE glow-up
imo reviewing PRs isn't too bad Comment deleted
Support Comment deleted