I Am The Garbage

Someone made a parody O'Reilly book cover called "Mastering Garbage Collection" with the subtitle "You Are the Garbage" and honestly? The author nailed it with "A. Displaced Engineer." The donkey on the cover really ties it all together—nothing says "technical excellence" like a stubborn animal that refuses to move forward. The reply asking if this is required reading for permanent under class status is chef's kiss. Because let's be real, in the age of AI replacing devs left and right, we're not learning garbage collection to optimize our code—we're learning it because WE are the objects being marked for deallocation. The garbage collector is just HR with extra steps at this point. Fun fact: Most modern garbage collectors use generational collection because younger objects die faster. Kind of like junior devs during their first on-call rotation.