Developers Fighting COVID-19, One Map Tracker at a Time

Level 1: Following the Crowd

Imagine there’s a big problem happening in your town, like a water shortage. All your friends want to help fix it. That’s great! But instead of finding different ways to help, every single friend decides to do the exact same thing – say, each one brings you a cup of water. The first cup of water is helpful, sure. But the next friend also brings a cup of water, and so does the next, and soon you have ten cups of water and a big spill, but still only one cup’s worth of actual help. They all meant well, but after the first one, the other nine weren’t really solving anything new. This meme is funny for a similar reason. During the pandemic, a lot of programmers wanted to help. But instead of each doing something different, most of them ended up making the same kind of website – a map showing COVID cases. The first one was useful, but the hundredth copy didn’t add much. It’s like everyone was just copying each other because that’s what they knew how to do. We laugh because we recognize that pattern: sometimes people (or programmers) just follow the crowd, even when it doesn’t make a big new difference. It’s a gentle way of saying, “They tried to help, but they all did it the exact same way!”

Level 2: Map All The Things

Let’s break down what’s going on for a less experienced developer or someone newer to these terms. The meme references a COVID-19 world map tracker. This is a type of data visualization that became very popular in 2020. Essentially, it’s an interactive map showing the spread of COVID-19 across different regions (countries, states, etc.), often with color coding or bubbles to indicate the number of cases, deaths, or recoveries in each area. You might have seen one on the news or online: for example, a world map where each country is shaded from light to dark red depending on how many cases it has – darker meaning more cases. That kind of map is called a choropleth map (fancy term for a map where regions are colored based on data values). There were also dashboards that included charts (like line graphs of case counts over time, or bar charts of daily new cases) alongside the map. All of this falls under Data Visualization, which is just the practice of turning numbers and data into pictures or graphics so humans can understand trends and information more easily at a glance.

Now, why does the meme joke about “makes another COVID-19 tracker”? Because so many developers built similar projects. When we say “tracker”, we mean a web application (usually a website or web page) that tracks something – in this case, COVID-19 statistics. A lot of developers, from hobbyists to professionals, created their own tracking dashboards. Typically, these web apps would fetch data from some public source – for instance, an API providing updated COVID case numbers for each country every day. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, which in simple terms is like a service you can ask for data. For COVID, there were APIs that gave back numbers of cases, etc., often in JSON format.) The developer’s app would download this data and then display it on a map or chart. Technologies commonly used for this included JavaScript and various frameworks or libraries. For example, many people used D3.js (a powerful JavaScript library for making interactive graphs and maps in the browser) to draw the world map and dynamically color it based on data. Others might have used mapping libraries or even things like Google Maps, or integrated chart libraries like Chart.js or used a higher-level framework like React or Angular to build the whole dashboard interface. But regardless of the tools, the end result was usually the same kind of thing: a COVID-19 “dashboard” with maps and charts updating daily.

For a junior dev, the familiarity and appeal of such a project are easy to understand. It’s a real-world problem (everyone was worried about the pandemic), and there was a ton of data available publicly. It feels meaningful to make something that shows, for example, how cases are growing in different countries. Plus, it’s a manageable scope for a single developer: you’re basically fetching data and then displaying it visually, which is a great exercise in both web development and working with data. Many tutorials popped up teaching exactly how to build your own COVID tracker using JavaScript – so it became almost a default side project for those stuck at home wanting to code something relevant. If you were learning web dev then, you might have even tried something like this: connecting to a COVID API, parsing JSON, and using, say, D3 or some chart library to put dots on a map or draw the “curve” (the infection curve) for various regions. It’s an application of WebDevelopment skills to a timely subject, and it teaches a bunch of things: handling APIs, updating the DOM with data-driven visuals, perhaps even deploying a site to share with friends. Pretty cool learning experience, honestly.

However, the meme is poking fun at the fact that by doing this, developers weren’t creating new solutions – they were mostly replicating what others had already done. The phrase “yet another” is key – it implies there’s a huge number of similar projects. And indeed, by mid-2020, there were dozens if not hundreds of COVID trackers out there. News sites had their own, universities had theirs, individuals deployed personal versions, and open-source repositories with “covid19tracker” in the name multiplied. They all tended to have the same features: a world map, some graphs, maybe drop-downs to pick a country or state, and tables of numbers. The humor comes from this repetition. Imagine going on Reddit or Twitter in those days – every other week a developer would proudly announce “I built a COVID-19 tracker!” and people would reply, “Cool... but there are a lot of these already.” It became a bit of a cliché in the dev community. That’s why the meme resonated: of course the programmer’s idea to “help fight coronavirus” is just building another tracker – we saw it coming a mile away.

This also highlights a little gap between intention and impact. The intention (especially for newer devs or students) was genuine: I want to contribute something useful. And to be fair, these trackers did help inform people, especially if they were localized or had a unique twist. But the impact of making one more tracker when there were already many wasn’t very large. By the time many got their personal projects off the ground, people already had favorite sites for checking COVID stats (like the big ones from health organizations or popular news dashboards). So a lot of these projects ended up mainly as learning experiences or portfolio pieces for the developer, rather than widely used public tools. In a sense, the meme is lightheartedly chiding developers for choosing a project that was safe and familiar (using skills they already have, like making maps with JavaScript) under the banner of helping. It’s a bit like a bunch of people all solving the same puzzle independently – satisfying for each of them, but somewhat redundant in the grand scheme of things.

To connect this to common early-career experiences: it’s very normal for multiple people to end up making similar projects, especially when following online trends or tutorials. For instance, think of how many beginners have created a to-do list app, or a personal blog site, or followed a tutorial to build a weather app. Those are almost rites of passage in learning web development. In 2020, making a COVID-19 tracker joined that list of popular projects. It combined working with real APIs, current data, and dynamic visuals – all useful skills to practice. So if you were (or are) a junior dev who built one, you’re definitely not alone! The meme just humorously points out that from a broader view, there was a kind of herd behavior (everyone doing the same thing). It’s a chuckle at how we developers sometimes all gravitate to the same “cool project” at the same time. But hey, at the end of the day, you still learn a lot by doing it, and that knowledge can be applied to more original projects later. Just maybe next time we’ll try to brainstorm something a bit different once we notice the whole world is already looking at similar map dashboards. 😉

Level 3: Dashboard Déjà Vu

In the early pandemic months of 2020, developers around the globe had grand ambitions to help fight COVID-19 using their coding skills. The top panel of the meme sets this scene: “programmers, trying to come up with a solution to help fight coronavirus.” It sounds noble and urgent, right? But the punchline comes immediately in the second panel: the actual action these devs take is a casually smug Bugs Bunny pulling the trigger on yet another COVID-19 world map tracker. This contrast is hilarious to seasoned developers because it captures a hype-driven pattern we know too well – when faced with a crisis, our industry tends to reach for the same flashy, familiar tool, over and over.

By May 2020 (when this meme was posted), it felt like every developer and their cat had built a COVID-19 dashboard. We saw a stampede of side projects plotting pandemic data on interactive maps. The first few were genuinely useful: for example, the famous Johns Hopkins case-tracking map gave everyone a centralized, up-to-date view of the outbreak. But then came the clones. Countless clones. It became a running joke that if you knew JavaScript, your instinctive response to the pandemic was to spin up yet another shiny web dashboard with a world map and some charts. The meme nails this absurdity: the lofty “I’m going to help!” thought balloon pops, revealing the same old solution being recycled one more time.

Why is this so funny (and a bit painful) to experienced devs? Because it’s a textbook case of bandwagon development. When a topic is trending (here, COVID-19 data), there’s an overwhelming temptation for programmers to jump in and build something - often without asking “Does the world need another one of these?” The image of Bugs Bunny in a flamboyant cowboy outfit, confidently shooting from the hip, is a perfect metaphor. Bugs’s smug face and relaxed posture say “I got this”, while the act of firing the pistol nonchalantly stands in for a coder’s knee-jerk deployment of a pet solution. It’s Wild West WebDev at its finest: problem arises, quick on the draw, we pull out our favorite tech stack and bang! – a new app appears. If all you have is a map, everything looks like a pandemic to plot. 🗺️

From a senior developer perspective, there’s rich irony here. Developers wanted to contribute meaningfully – it was a scary time, and coding felt like something we could do while stuck at home. But truly fighting the virus required expertise in biology, healthcare, logistics – arenas where most coders had little footing. So, many gravitated toward what was familiar and achievable: data visualization. Plotting case numbers felt helpful and achievable with our existing skills. You didn’t need to understand virology or supply chains to make a map; you just needed an API endpoint with case counts and a JavaScript library. And frankly, it was satisfying to see those red dots and rising curves – a tangible output in a world of invisible microbes. The result? A glut of nearly identical COVID trackers differing only in color scheme, framework, or the positioning of the legend. This is the novelty gap the meme points out: despite the appearance of innovation (new app, new repo name), most of these projects were carbon copies offering no new insight. It’s déjà vu on a global scale – open one tracker, you’ve seen them all.

There’s also an implied satire of our industry’s “solutionism”. That is, the belief that coding something is equivalent to solving the problem. The meme’s absurdity lies in showing how programmers tackled a worldwide pandemic as if it were a coding weekend: write some code, push to GitHub, deploy a site – fixed! It’s poking fun at that overconfidence (Bugs’s smug grin) where building a pretty map becomes a self-congratulatory end in itself. The pistol imagery even suggests a “silver bullet” mentality – as if a neat JavaScript app were the magic bullet to defeat the virus. Seasoned devs chuckle (or groan) at this because we’ve seen it in other forms: when confronted with complex social or business problems, tech folks can default to churning out apps or dashboards that visualize the issue rather than address root causes. It’s not that data tracking isn’t useful – it is – but by the tenth clone, you realize everyone coded the same idea in parallel, rather than tackling unsolved problems or coordinating efforts. As one might cynically joke, “Sure, global pandemic solved – I’ll just npm install a solution and deploy it by lunchtime.” 🙄

Historically, this meme highlights a repeating cycle in tech culture. During any big event or trend, developers often produce a flurry of similar projects. (Remember when every hackathon project pitched was "Uber for X" or when every new framework’s tutorial was a to-do list app?) In 2020, the COVID-19 tracker became the new “Hello World” of crisis coding. It was almost a rite of passage for devs locked down at home: make a map, plot the curve, share the link. The community quickly recognized the pattern and started poking fun at itself. The meme captures that self-awareness: we know we went overboard. The absurdity isn’t just that so many maps were made, but that each developer likely thought their version was a meaningful contribution. It’s a gentle roast of our good intentions and our tendency to solve problems in the way most familiar to us. In true developer humor fashion, we’re laughing at ourselves: fighting a once-in-a-century pandemic with dozens of nearly identical JavaScript dashboards, as if lines of code and colorful graphs were as valuable as PPE and testing kits.

In summary, the humor at this level comes from recognizing the industry trend of 2020: a well-intentioned but somewhat ego-driven rush to build redundant COVID-19 trackers. It’s the intersection of Web Development hype, the ease of modern data viz tools, and a bit of collective tech naïveté. Seasoned devs grin (or facepalm) because we see both our younger selves and our entire field in that Bugs Bunny meme – confidently doing something technically cool but missing the bigger picture. Dashboard déjà vu, indeed: we literally saw that same world map with case numbers dozens of times, and this meme is our inside joke to cope with it.