When every shiny balloon is a tempting new side project
Description
Four-panel cartoon in a stick-figure, Cyanide-and-Happiness style. Panel 1: a smiling developer character walks through a park holding a single red balloon labeled “New Project”. Panel 2: the same character casually releases a blue balloon also labeled “New project”, letting it float away while still gripping the red one. Panel 3: the developer now clutches a huge bundle of multicolored balloons (yellow, green, pink, red, blue) while an orange balloon tied to a bench reads “New project”. Panel 4: the growing cluster lifts the developer off the ground and he drifts skyward, leaving the bench and lamppost below. Visually, the comic exaggerates the tendency of engineers to chase countless fresh ideas; technically, it comments on ‘shiny-object syndrome’, context-switching overhead, and the negative impact on focus, delivery, and project management discipline
Comments
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Architecture diagram: one grounded monolith, sixteen side-project balloons, and me drifting into “the cloud” - turns out eventual consistency applies to my attention span, too
The only difference between a startup MVP and enterprise software is that in the startup, you're still pretending the balloons will eventually land somewhere intentional
Every senior engineer's GitHub profile: 47 repositories, 3 with more than 5 commits, 1 actually deployed to production, and 43 README files that still say 'TODO: Add documentation.' The real technical debt isn't in the code - it's in the graveyard of side projects we swore we'd finish 'next weekend' three years ago
Proof that ignoring WIP limits makes you cloud-native: every 'new project' balloon adds lift while throughput drops to zero, per Little's Law
Roadmap optimization: grab enough greenfield “new project” balloons and you can float above SLAs, tech debt, and the on-call rotation
Scope creep: starts as one 'New Project' balloon, ends as a cluster defying gravity and your original sprint velocity