Documentation By Screenshot

Ah, the classic startup life where your job description is "everything." Big companies have entire departments managing cloud infrastructure, but at startups? You're not just wearing multiple hats—you're the entire hat factory. Nothing says "we're disrupting the industry" quite like one sleep-deprived developer frantically Googling "how to AWS" at 3 AM while simultaneously being the backend team, frontend team, DevOps engineer, and the guy who fixes the coffee machine. Your LinkedIn says "Full Stack Developer" but your reality is "Full Panic Mode." Bonus points if you've ever uttered the phrase "it works on my machine" to yourself because there's literally no one else to say it to.

Every developer has uttered those fateful words: "It works on my machine!" – the universal excuse when code mysteriously fails elsewhere. Then some genius had the audacity to suggest, "What if we just shipped the entire machine?" and Docker containers were born. Instead of spending hours debugging environment differences, we now spend hours debugging Docker configuration files. Progress! The circle of developer suffering continues, just with fancier terminology and cooler logos.

OH. MY. GOD. The AUDACITY of this meme! 💀 It's literally every developer who attended ONE tech conference about microservices and suddenly thinks their to-do list app needs to handle BILLIONS of users! The bears stacked on bears is the PERFECT metaphor for how we build these ridiculously over-architected solutions for problems that don't exist! "Let me just add Kubernetes, a message queue, and 17 microservices to my blog that gets 3 visitors a month... you know... for SCALING!" Meanwhile your entire user base is your mom and that one bot from Russia. The "O RLY?" at the bottom is just *chef's kiss* - the perfect sarcastic cherry on top of this overengineered sundae!

Ah, the classic "Scooby-Doo villain reveal" but with a software architecture twist. The company proudly announces their fancy microservice architecture, but when the developer pulls off the mask, surprise! It's just a distributed monolith underneath. For the uninitiated: a distributed monolith is when you split your application into separate services that look like microservices, but they're so tightly coupled they can't be deployed independently. So you get all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits. It's like buying a sports car but filling the trunk with concrete.

Management: "Why didn't moving to the cloud fix everything?" Developer: "Let me redesign for cloud-native." Management: "No. Just containerize it." Developer: "You can't fix architectural problems by saying buzzwords." Management: "Kubernetes." The classic "throw tech at it" approach. Spoiler alert: slapping containers on a monolith is like putting racing stripes on a shopping cart. Still a shopping cart, just more expensive and now someone has to learn Docker.

Just turned what should've been a 10-line script into a microservice architecture with seven Docker containers and a message queue. The client wanted a contact form, but I gave them an enterprise solution complete with Kubernetes orchestration. Now I'm standing here in my sunglasses feeling like a tech god while some poor soul rows the boat behind me doing all the actual work.