Screw You Broadcom

You set up a cute little home server to host your personal projects, maybe run Plex, store your files, tinker with Docker containers... and suddenly everyone at the family gathering wants you to explain what it does. Next thing you know, Uncle Bob wants you to "fix his Wi-Fi" and your non-tech friends think you're running a crypto mining operation. The swear jar stays empty because you've learned to keep your mouth shut. But that "telling people about my home server when I wasn't asked" jar? That's your retirement fund. Every time you can't resist explaining your beautiful self-hosted setup, another dollar goes in. The worst part? You know you're doing it, but the urge to evangelize about your Raspberry Pi cluster is just too strong. Pro tip: The moment someone shows mild interest, you're already mentally planning their entire homelab migration. Nobody asked, but they're getting a 45-minute presentation anyway.

Ah, the classic Docker bloat syndrome. Why create a svelte 50MB image with just what you need when you can ship a 2GB monstrosity that includes three Linux distros, a complete JDK, and somehow Visual Studio? The "minimal container" is just a theoretical concept developers tell themselves exists while they casually add another layer with "just one more dependency." By Friday, your microservice needs its own ZIP code.

That special moment when you've kicked off a CI pipeline that takes 20 minutes to run, so you stare intensely at your screen pretending to be productive. Your brain is actually 99% focused on refreshing that pipeline status page every 12 seconds while the remaining 1% attempts to look busy when your manager walks by. The modern developer's version of watching paint dry – except with more anxiety and coffee.

Welcome to your new kingdom, fresh DevOps hire. That beautiful sunset? That's the entire infrastructure you just inherited. Every server, every pipeline, every cursed bash script held together with duct tape and prayers—it's all yours now. The previous DevOps engineer? They're gone. Probably on a beach somewhere with their phone turned off. And you're standing here like Simba looking over Pride Rock, except instead of a thriving ecosystem, it's technical debt as far as the eye can see. That deployment that breaks every Tuesday at 3 AM? Your problem. The monitoring system that alerts for literally everything? Your problem. The Kubernetes cluster running version 1.14 because "if it ain't broke"? Oh, you better believe that's your problem. Best part? Everyone expects you to fix it all while keeping everything running. No pressure though.

Who needs spiritual enlightenment when you've got a CI/CD pipeline that actually works? That moment when all your deployment checks turn green is basically the tech equivalent of nirvana. After days of fighting with Docker configs and environment variables, seeing those green checkmarks feels better than any meditation retreat. The real religion of developers isn't in any ancient text—it's watching that deployment succeed without a single red error message. Pure bliss. Pure meaning. Pure validation that maybe—just maybe—you're not completely terrible at your job after all.

You know what's wild? After 10+ years in this industry, I can architect a distributed microservices system in my sleep, but ask me to get Node versions, Docker containers, environment variables, and database connections working on a fresh machine? Suddenly I'm googling "why is my localhost refusing connection" for the 847th time. The actual coding is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lurks the absolute monstrosity of dependency hell, conflicting Python versions, that one environment variable you forgot to set, Docker daemon not running, ports already in use, SSL certificates expired, and my personal favorite: "works on my machine" syndrome. Spent 30 minutes writing elegant code? Cool. Now spend 3 hours figuring out why your colleague's setup script doesn't work because they're on an M1 Mac and you're on Windows with WSL2 and nothing is compatible with anything anymore.