Engineer kicks in the door for shiny, undocumented Go-based DevOps toys

Level 1: Kid in a Candy Store

Imagine you’re in a candy store with three big jars in front of you. The first jar is filled with a candy that might look plain, but everyone who tries it says, “Yeah, this always tastes good.” The second jar has a newer candy that a lot of people have tried and liked – it’s a popular flavor that’s proven to be tasty. Now the third jar is super bright and sparkling; it’s a brand new candy that just came out. It’s got flashy packaging and promises it’s the sweetest, most amazing candy ever… but here’s the catch: nobody you know has actually tasted it, and there are no instructions on the wrapper. In the meme, the engineer is like a kid who ignores the first two safe choices and excitedly jumps straight for the unknown, glittery candy in jar number three. He’s literally kicking the door open to get to it! It’s funny because we all kind of recognize that feeling – being so attracted to something shiny and new that we forget about the reliable options. We laugh because we know that often the shiny new candy can turn out to be too sour or make your tummy hurt (uh oh!), whereas the “boring” candy would have been just fine. In simpler terms, this joke is about how people (especially in tech) sometimes make risky choices just because something looks cool and exciting, even though it might cause trouble later. It’s like saying, “Sure, that new toy looks amazing, but maybe we’ll regret not using the trusty old toy that never breaks.” The humor comes from watching someone give in to that temptation and thinking, “Oh boy, here we go – this is not gonna end well, but I can’t look away!”

Level 2: Battle-Tested vs Bleeding-Edge

Let’s break down what’s going on here in more straightforward terms. We have an engineer faced with three doors, each representing a set of tools/technologies to use for managing systems (this is all about DevOps, which is the practice of blending software development with IT operations – basically, the folks who set up servers, deploy code, and keep things running).

• Door 1 is labeled “boring tech that always works” and has logos for Ansible and Puppet. These are configuration management tools. For a junior engineer: think of them as super-powerful scripts to set up machines or deploy apps reliably. Puppet (an older tool, dating back to mid-2000s) and Ansible (newer, since early 2010s) let you describe how your servers should be configured in code. They might be called “boring” because they’ve been around a long time and everyone knows them – but that’s exactly why they’re reliable. They have tons of documentation and a large user community. If you follow their playbook/manifest recipes, you can be pretty confident your software will run the same way every time. In other words, these tools are predictable. A server set up with Puppet or Ansible is unlikely to surprise you because thousands of engineers have ironed out the kinks over the years. There’s comfort in that when you’re on the hook to keep things running!

• Door 2 is labeled “Tools that have been battle-tested in production” (production means real-world use in live systems) and shows logos for Terraform, Prometheus, and Kubernetes. These represent a slightly newer generation of tools, but ones that have proven themselves. Terraform is an “Infrastructure as Code” tool – instead of clicking around a cloud provider’s UI to create servers or databases, you write code to describe that infrastructure. Terraform has been widely adopted, so it’s known to work with all the major clouds, and you can find solutions online for almost any problem because lots of folks use it. Prometheus is a monitoring system that collects metrics (like CPU usage, errors rates, etc.) from services and alerts you if things go wrong. It’s become the de facto standard for cloud monitoring, meaning it’s very robust now. Kubernetes is the famous container orchestration platform – it manages containers (lightweight, portable application packages) across a cluster of machines. By 2021, Kubernetes was essentially the backbone of modern cloud deployments in many companies, so while it’s complex, it’s definitely battle-tested. In short, Door 2’s tools are modern and powerful, but importantly, they’re known quantities: people have run big websites and applications with them successfully. They have large communities, lots of guides, and you generally know what you’re getting into using them. Any big surprises have mostly been uncovered and fixed by early adopters in past years – that’s what “battle-tested” implies.

• Door 3 is the wild one. Its heading says “projects with zero docs but written in golang, never seen prod but can do EVERYTHING, shiny af”. The logos here – Knative, Istio, OpenFaaS, Jenkins X – are all examples of very new technologies (at least as of 2021) in the DevOps and cloud space. They’re part of the cloud-native ecosystem, which often means they came out of the efforts around Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. These projects are typically written in Go (Golang), which is a programming language invented at Google that’s great for systems tools (many cloud tools use Go because it produces fast, small binaries and has good concurrency support). Let’s briefly explain each:

  • Knative: It’s a tool to enable serverless computing on top of Kubernetes. Serverless means you can run your code without having to manage the servers it runs on – the system auto-scales your code up and down. Knative lets developers deploy functions or small services that scale to zero (no usage means no resources) and scale up when needed. Exciting idea, but in early days it could be tricky to set up.
  • Istio: This is what’s called a service mesh. In a microservices architecture (where your application is split into many small services), a service mesh helps manage all the network communication between those services. Istio can do things like route traffic intelligently, enforce security policies (like encryption between services), and provide rich monitoring of service-to-service calls. It basically puts a little smart proxy (Envoy proxy) alongside each service to handle these tasks. It’s powerful but very complex to operate – lots of config, and it can introduce its own bugs or performance issues if you’re not careful. In 2021, Istio was relatively new and many companies were experimenting but also struggling with it.
  • OpenFaaS: Stands for “Open Function as a Service.” Similar to Knative in that it lets you run functions (small snippets of code) on demand. It’s an open-source project that aimed to make it easy to deploy those on any environment (your laptop, your servers, or on Kubernetes). It’s part of the broader serverless trend.
  • Jenkins X: You might have heard of Jenkins, which is a very established automation server for CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery – basically building, testing, and deploying software automatically). Jenkins X was a newer project to re-imagine Jenkins for cloud-native environments. It tried to use Kubernetes underneath to manage the build process, and incorporate modern Git-based workflows (like preview environments, GitOps, etc.).

Now, what’s common to all of Door 3’s projects? They’re very powerful and ambitious – each claims to simplify or revolutionize some aspect of deploying or managing software (whether it’s handling all your microservice traffic magically with Istio, or letting you forget about servers entirely with Knative/OpenFaaS, or automating CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins X). That’s why the door label says “can do EVERYTHING” – it’s only a slight exaggeration of the marketing around these tools. However, they’re also very new (at the time) and often had incomplete documentation (“zero docs” is obviously an exaggeration for effect – there’s usually some docs – but it feels that way when docs are sparse or not beginner-friendly). “Never seen prod” means hardly anyone has run these in their real, customer-facing environments yet. So there isn’t a large base of real-world experience to draw on if you encounter problems. Essentially, choosing these means you’re on the bleeding edge: you’ll be among the first people discovering bugs, figuring out best configurations, and maybe even contributing fixes upstream because nobody else has done it yet! That’s exciting, but also very risky for a team that just wants things to work.

For a junior developer or someone new to DevOps, it might not be immediately obvious why Door 3 is such a gamble. After all, if these new tools “can do everything,” why wouldn’t you want that, right? The meme is illustrating the temptation: new tech often promises to solve a lot of pain points in one go. And as engineers, we naturally get curious and excited about new possibilities (plus, it’s fun to play with new toys!). It’s like how every few months there’s a buzz about “the next big thing” – we see cool conference demos or blog posts about how some startup reduced their deployment time by 10x using FancyTool X. It’s easy to think, “Wow, we should use FancyTool X too!” That excitement is the engineer in the first panel, standing between Door 2 and Door 3, considering going for the shiny new tools.

However, experienced DevOps folks have a saying: “Don’t trust it in production until someone else has.” This is because when software runs in production (with real users, real traffic, real stakes), it encounters all sorts of edge cases and stress that you won’t see in a small test or demo. Battle-tested tools (Door 2) have gone through that gauntlet already; their rough edges have been smoothed out over time. Bleeding-edge tools (Door 3) have not – you’ll be the one hitting those edges. And if the project has poor documentation, you won’t have a map of the landmines; you’ll step on them and then have to figure out what blew up. New projects can also undergo sudden changes – APIs might not be stable, features you rely on could change or vanish in the next release, etc., which is tough to manage.

The meme’s humor comes from recognizing this scenario and perhaps remembering when you or your team made a similar choice. Maybe you insisted on using the latest JavaScript framework or a new database that all the blogs were raving about, instead of sticking with something proven. It probably felt exhilarating at first – until you hit a bizarre bug or realized there was zero community help available because not many people had tried it yet. Then you have that “oh no, what have I done?” moment. The engineer drop-kicking Door 3 is right at the peak of that excitement, not yet aware of the likely hangover to follow. Those of us who have been around a bit chuckle because we see a bit of our younger selves in that, and we know the kind of hard-earned lessons that are probably coming next.

In summary, at this level we understand the meme as a funny exaggeration of a real IT decision-making issue: stable vs. shiny. Door 1 and 2 options represent safe, reliable choices for DevOps tools – they might not be glamorous, but they’ve proven they work. Door 3 represents the new hot tech that’s very enticing but risky. The engineer choosing Door 3 (with gusto!) is like a newbie trap that many fall into. It’s poking fun at how often tech teams will chase the latest trend (the hype cycle) even when it might not be the wise choice for running critical systems. If you’re early in your career, this meme is practically saying, “Trust me, I know it looks cool, but think twice before using something in production that nobody’s documented or used at scale. You might thank yourself later.” And if you do go for the shiny tools, well… at least you’ll have a good war story to share on Reddit someday, right? 😅

Level 3: Go For Broke

At the highest level, this meme is skewering a classic DevOps folly: given a choice between stable vs bleeding-edge tools, some engineers just can’t resist the shiny option. We see an engineer literally kicking down Door #3, labeled for flashy new projects (“zero docs but written in Go, can do EVERYTHING, shiny af”). Doors #1 and #2 offer perfectly good tech: tried-and-true config management like Ansible and Puppet, and battle-tested infrastructure tooling like Terraform, Prometheus, even Kubernetes. These are the kind of boring tech that always works and has been proven in production. But nope – our intrepid door-kicker goes straight for the CNCF candy store behind Door #3. Why? Because it’s packed with hyped, cutting-edge goodies: Knative, Istio, OpenFaaS, Jenkins X – all promising to “do everything” in sleek Golang style. It’s the tech equivalent of a sugar rush, and this engineer has a serious case of shiny new tool syndrome.

What makes this funny to seasoned engineers is how relentlessly familiar this scene is. We’ve all witnessed (or committed) the “hype-driven development” decision: skipping over well-documented, reliable solutions in favor of a hot-off-the-press framework or some Cloud Native gizmo that just hit HackerNews. It’s practically a rite of passage in modern ops_tool_selection. The meme exaggerates it perfectly: the guy doesn’t just pick Door 3 – he drop-kicks it open. That dramatic boot represents the over-eager, borderline reckless enthusiasm for new tech. It doesn’t matter that the project has zero docs (zero documentation) and zero production deployments to its name. It’s written in Go (cue the golang_hype) and carries the cool aura of the CNCF ecosystem, so it must be the future, right? Who needs sleep or stability when you have a shiny new service mesh? 🙃

This situation is painfully real for DevOps/SRE folks. Door #1’s “boring” tools (like a Puppet script that’s been running fine since 2014) rarely wake you up at 3 AM. Door #2’s tools (Terraform plans, Kubernetes clusters, Prometheus alerts) are modern but well-understood – they’ve been hardened by thousands of engineers in prod. In contrast, Door #3’s bleeding-edge toys often come with hidden sharp edges. Choosing them can mean your team unknowingly volunteers to be beta testers in production. It’s a running joke in the industry: “Sure, let’s deploy this brand-new alpha-release project to prod – what could possibly go wrong?” (Answer: plenty. You’ll find out at 3 AM when it crashes in a way no one’s seen before.) The humor has a dark twist: we laugh because we’ve lived through the on-call nightmares caused by this exact kind of decision. The engineer’s pose – confidently kicking in that door – is the overconfidence of youth (or inexperience), thinking we’re gonna conquer our problems with this cool new tool, while veteran ops folks facepalm in the background.

Let’s decode the cast of characters on each door and why Door #3 is so tempting yet perilous:

Door	What’s on it	Translation
Door 1 – “Boring tech that always works”	Logos: Ansible, Puppet	Rock-solid config management tools. They deploy code and configure servers reliably. Not fancy, but they won’t surprise you at 2AM.
Door 2 – “Battle-tested in production”	Logos: Terraform, Prometheus, Kubernetes	Modern infrastructure staples. They’re widely used, well-documented, and have huge communities. Problems are known and Google-able.
Door 3 – “Zero docs, written in Go, never seen prod, does EVERYTHING”	Logos: Knative, Istio, OpenFaaS, Jenkins X	New hotness from the cloud-native hype machine. Promises the world, but likely hides “unknown unknowns.” Hope you like digging through GitHub issues and Slack channels for support.

As you can see, Door #3’s offerings are all shiny new CNCF projects. Each one sounds amazing on paper (or at a conference keynote). Knative promises serverless workloads on Kubernetes (no more worrying about servers, it auto-scales your functions!). Istio offers a magical service mesh that can encrypt and route traffic between microservices with fine-grained control (who wouldn’t want seamless mTLS and traffic splitting?). OpenFaaS says you can deploy functions easily, bringing the ease of cloud serverless to your own clusters. Jenkins X proclaims it can automate your entire CI/CD pipeline in a cloud-native way (CI/CD as code on Kubernetes, woohoo!). These ideas are catnip to ambitious engineers – they tick all the buzzwords: serverless, service mesh, functions-as-a-service, GitOps, cloud-native CI. And importantly, most of them are written in Go – a language beloved in DevOps for its efficiency and portability. It’s as if Golang has become the unofficial badge of “modern, cool infra tool”. So our engineer’s eyes are sparkling: Door 3 isn’t just one new toy, it’s a whole treasure chest of new tech that could transform their stack and make it “modern”.

But the meme’s punchline is that this is a trap disguised as a treasure chest. The phrase “shiny af” (shiny as ****) in the door label is both the allure and the warning. Shiny things attract attention, but often lack depth – in this case, depth like good documentation, known best practices, or any proof the tool actually works reliably outside of a demo. A cynic (hello there 👋) will note that “can do EVERYTHING” is a red flag; in tech, a tool claiming to solve all problems usually means it’s overcomplicated or unfocused. And if it’s “never seen prod”, guess who gets to discover all the lovely bugs and scalability issues? That’s right – the poor soul who kicked down the door. It’s basically volunteering to be an unwitting QA department for someone’s open-source project. It’s funny in the meme, but it’s not so funny when you’re the one diffs-deep in an unfamiliar codebase at dawn, trying to figure out why your Istio sidecar ate all the memory on your cluster.

The humor here also plays on the Tech Hype Cycle. We’ve seen this cycle over and over:

1. Inflated expectations – A new tool is released with great fanfare (blog posts, conference talks, slick logos). It’s the Next Big Thing, and early adopters rave about its potential. Our engineer at Door 3 is in this phase, full of FOMO and optimism.
2. Trough of disillusionment – Fast-forward a few months into using it: unexpected headaches, quirky bugs, incomplete features, and “oops, we didn’t think of that” problems crop up. That’s when the absence of documentation or community support really hits. (Picture that engineer now dealing with a broken production deploy on Friday night, frantically scrolling Slack threads for answers – the memeworthy comeuppance.)
3. Plateau of productivity – Maybe a year or two later, the tool matures. It gets better docs, more stable releases, perhaps becomes truly useful – if it survives that long. By then of course, the industry has probably moved on to a new shiny toy, and the cycle repeats.

The meme captures that first phase, where excitement overrides caution. The engineer’s suit and pose (hands on hips evaluating the doors, then the full flying kick) suggests a bit of overconfidence, maybe even resume-driven development – choosing tech that looks impressive on your CV rather than what best fits the job. Choosing Istio or Knative might make you sound cutting-edge in a meetup, whereas saying you still use Puppet might get eye-rolls as “old school”. That pressure to be seen using the latest and greatest is very real in tech culture, even if it’s irrational from a reliability standpoint.

In sum, Level 3 analysis sees the meme as a commentary on DevOps decision-making dysfunction. It highlights the eternal tension between stability and innovation. On one side, you have the boring but dependable solutions (the ones that “just work” and let you sleep at night). On the other, the exciting new paradigms that promise to revolutionize everything (but might set your hair on fire). The meme leans into the comedic absurdity that, despite knowing better, teams often rush headlong through Door #3. And trust me, the battle-scarred veterans reading this are smirking because we know exactly how that story ends: with someone muttering “We should have stuck with what works” while sweeping up the debris of a failed experiment.