Do Not Deploy On Friday

The eternal gap between theoretical architecture and actual production traffic! 😂 When someone asks if your system can handle a million concurrent users, but your current load is just TEN people, what do you do? Tell the truth and look incompetent or confidently lie and pray you'll never have to prove it? This is basically every startup pitch deck vs. actual server metrics. "Oh yeah, our architecture is totally cloud-native, horizontally scalable to infinity!" Meanwhile, the poor Node.js server is running on a t2.micro instance that crashes when three people use the search function simultaneously. The best part? When the miracle happens and you actually get that traffic spike, you'll be frantically Googling "how to optimize database queries at 3am" while telling management "it's just a minor scaling issue!"

The absurdity of modern software bloat in one perfect screenshot! A 10KB JPEG requires 152.77GB of space? That's like needing an aircraft carrier to deliver a postcard. Game developers be like: "We fixed a typo in the credits. Download size: 87GB." Meanwhile, entire operating systems from the 90s fit on a floppy disk. The driveway analogy is brilliant—having storage space doesn't justify developers treating your SSD like their personal dumping ground. No, I don't want to sacrifice 1/4 of my hard drive because you couldn't be bothered to implement delta patching.

The harsh reality of Git commands visualized with brutal accuracy. Landing a plane? That's your git commit - looks smooth but you're still touching ground. Taking off with git push ? Sure, your code's airborne but there's always turbulence ahead in production. And then there's git add - literally passengers climbing stairs to nowhere in the middle of a desert. That's what happens when you stage files without knowing what the hell you're actually including. Seven years as a lead and I still catch juniors blindly adding everything with git add . and wondering why their API keys ended up on GitHub.

The sacred emergency protocol for developers! When flames engulf your workspace, priorities must be established: first, git commit those precious changes you've been working on for the last 4 hours. Then git push to ensure your code survives even if you don't. Only THEN should you consider the trivial matter of personal safety by leaving the building. Because losing code is the real disaster - flesh heals, but that elegant solution to your recursion problem? Irreplaceable.

The only programming advice worth taking is the one you'll find on that little strip of wisdom: "IF IT WORKS, DON'T TOUCH IT." Nothing strikes more fear into a developer's heart than having to modify code that's somehow functioning despite violating every principle of software engineering. That magical spaghetti mess held together by duct tape and prayers? Yeah, that's staying exactly as is. The moment you try to "improve" it or "refactor" it, you'll unleash chaos that'll have you explaining to your boss why the entire production system is suddenly speaking Klingon. The unwritten 11th commandment of programming: thou shalt not mess with working code.

The joke here is about the existential dread every developer feels when they realize the maintainers of critical open-source libraries that power basically the entire internet (tz database, SQLite, ImageMagick, and FFmpeg) could all theoretically die in a single bus accident. This is the infamous "bus factor" in software development - how screwed would we be if key contributors got hit by a bus? For these particular libraries, the answer is "catastrophically screwed." These aren't just any libraries - they're the unsexy workhorses handling time zones, databases, image processing, and video encoding that silently power everything from your banking app to Netflix. And the kicker? Most are maintained by small teams or even single individuals, often working for free. Sweet dreams!