Literally Every Meeting

The eternal standoff between management and the lone developer. Boss wants deployment, dev explains there are bugs and they're understaffed, boss responds with "We need this done today!" because deadlines trump reality. Next week's comic: same dev explaining why production is on fire. Tale as old as Git.

The eternal flowchart of developer optimism. Notice how there's no actual arrow connecting "Tell everyone" to "Finish project"? That's because after you've bragged about your revolutionary idea to automate your coffee maker with blockchain, the motivation mysteriously evaporates. The missing step should be "Discover 47 GitHub repos that already did it better." Your project graveyard is just getting started, friend.

That desperate look when you're silently begging your coworker to review your monolithic PR because you've gone rogue and changed half the codebase in one commit. We all know the best practice is small, incremental changes, but some days you wake up and choose violence. Your team's Slack is suddenly silent, senior devs are "in meetings" all day, and you're left with that 200-file monster that started as "just a quick refactor." Good luck explaining those 8,000 lines of changes in the standup tomorrow!

The perfect representation of code review culture in the wild. Guy 1 frantically points out someone's terrible code like it's a five-alarm fire, while Guy 2 delivers the crushing reality check: absolutely nobody gives a damn. The same devs who'll argue for hours about tabs vs. spaces will happily ignore a production codebase that looks like it was written by randomly mashing a keyboard. Welcome to software engineering, where we're simultaneously perfectionists and completely fine with duct-taped solutions that "just work." The duality of programmer.

That moment when you're pair programming and your teammate is absolutely crushing it—clean logic, elegant solutions, the works. But then you glance at their screen and realize they've got their code minimized, collapsed, or straight-up hidden behind another window. Like, dude, I KNOW you're cooking something beautiful over there, why are you protecting it like it's the nuclear launch codes? Either you're writing the next Linux kernel or you've got variable names like fart_counter and yeet() . The suspicion is real.

The secret sauce of looking like you know what you're doing in tech isn't the code—it's the performance art. Turn a monitor vertical, squint thoughtfully at some blue-themed IDE while occasionally muttering "scope issue" or "need to commit these changes," and suddenly you're the office wizard. The best part? The more confused you actually are, the more convincingly profound you appear. Seven years as a lead developer and I still do this during standup when I haven't made any progress since yesterday.