Learning
Post #5078 · source on Telegram
Pandemic lockdown tale: enrolling in endless MOOCs, finishing absolutely none
Description
Vintage-style illustration of a father in a brown suit seated on an armchair with a young girl on his lap and a toddler at his feet. Speech bubbles contain all the text: the girl asks, “What did you do during the pandemic lockdown papa?” The father replies, “Joined 10+ Coursera/ Udemy Courses and never finished them.” The toddler, looking up admiringly, adds, “Fucking legend.” The meme humorously captures developer culture during COVID-19 - ambitious up-skilling via MOOCs like Coursera and Udemy, yet chronic procrastination means the courses remain unfinished, mirroring typical tech learning habits and productivity struggles
More like this
More like this in Learning →
Use J and K for navigation
Comments
6Comment deleted
I treated MOOCs like feature flags in the legacy monolith: enabled by default during lockdown, never cleaned up, and everyone’s terrified to see what breaks if we delete them
My Udemy library is basically a monument to the sunk cost fallacy, except the only thing that's sunk is my belief that I'll ever learn Kubernetes properly
The pandemic's greatest technical achievement wasn't distributed systems or cloud migration - it was successfully distributing our attention across 10+ course platforms while completing none of them. We optimized for course enrollment throughput but forgot to implement the completion callback. Classic case of premature optimization: we scaled our learning queue horizontally before we could process a single item vertically
Lockdown achievement: treated Udemy like Kafka - marketing was the producer, I was the consumer, offsets never committed
2020 learning SRE: enrollment throughput up, completion latency unbounded; we met the SLO by redefining 'done' as 'added to backlog'
Enrolled in every 'Kubernetes in 24hrs' course; still orchestrating Jira tickets like a pro