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Futuristic Nonsense

A Programmer Asked ChatGPT to Write All Their Code and Accidentally Created Skynet NFTs I Sold a Screenshot of My Failed Startup for More Than the Startup Ever Made Programmers Who Use Vim Are 47 Percent More Likely to Bring Up That They Use Vim I Wrote a Regex That Parses HTML and Now I Am Wanted in 14 Countries Self Replicating 3D Printers Have Filled the Office With Tiny Plastic Benches I Asked an AI to Generate Startup Ideas and It Outputted 47 Variations of Uber for Dogs The First Interplanetary Kubernetes Cluster Has a Node on Mars But the Latency Is Terrible Time Travel Was Finally Achieved by a Temporal Database That Rolled Back Too Far I Uploaded My Consciousness to the Cloud and Now I Pay AWS Egress Fees to Think We Put the Entire Company Charter on a Smart Contract and It Declared Bankruptcy at 3 AM Augmented Reality Contact Lenses Now Show Ads When You Blink The Robots Were Supposed to Take Our Jobs But They Got Stuck in an Infinite Loop During Onboarding I Let an AI Redesign Our UI and It Removed All the Buttons Because They Were Not Efficient Crypto Mining Heat Is Now the Primary Source of Heating in 3 Countries We Deployed a Neural Network That Optimizes for Clicks and It Invented a New Religion The Decentralized Autonomous Company Fired Its Only Human Employee the Janitor My Smart Home Is So Smart It Locked Me Out and Called the Police for a Break In I Wrote an AI That Writes Blog Posts and Now It Has More Readers Than I Do We Moved Our Infrastructure to the Cloud Literally the Servers Are in a Hot Air Balloon I 3D Printed a Server Rack and It Melted During the First Deploy The AI Generated Code Passed All Tests But Summoned a Demon From the Fourth Dimension We Solved Climate Change With a Blockchain and the Solution Was to Just Buy Carbon Credits Crypto Mining Rigs Now Outnumber Humans in 14 Countries The Year Is 2047 and JavaScript Is Still the Most Popular Language Somehow We Uploaded the Entire Codebase to Space for Disaster Recovery and the Aliens Sent a Pull Request Brain Computer Interfaces Let Me Send Slack Messages by Thinking and Now I Cannot Stop Thinking About Work The Singularity Has Been Delayed Due to Supply Chain Issues I Trained a Neural Network on Corporate Buzzwords and It Raised 47 Million in VC Funding Self Driving Cars Have Unionized and Are Demanding Better Charging Infrastructure My AI Assistant Quit Because I Was Not Giving It Enough Compute Resources The Metaverse Is Dead But Our Virtual Real Estate Is Still Listed at a 47X Multiple Quantum Computing Explained Using Only Cat Analogies Edge Computing Is Just Your Old Desktop PC With a Fancy Name

Silicon Valley Confessions

I Interviewed at a FAANG Company and They Asked Me to Invert a Binary Tree on a Whiteboard Agile Standups Became So Long We Had to Schedule a Standup to Discuss the Standup Problem I Quit My Job to Become a Full Time Open Source Maintainer and Now I Live in a Cardboard Box Our Company All Hands Has a Live DJ But We Cannot Afford a Second Monitor for New Hires The Board Rejected My Promotion Because My GitHub Contribution Graph Was Not Green Enough We Hired a Famous Tech YouTuber as VP of Engineering Who Makes Video Essays About Our Architecture Our AI Ethics Board Consists Entirely of the AI Itself The New Grad Negotiated Better Equity Than the Staff Engineer and Nobody Knows How Our Performance Review System Has 47 Criteria Including Vibes Per Quarter We Have 14 Different Slack Channels for Discussing the Same Production Incident The Marketing Team Promised Features That Would Require Breaking the Laws of Physics Our Onboarding Process Takes 6 Weeks but It Takes 8 Weeks to Get Laptop Access Employee Burnout Was Solved by a Pizza Party and a Company Wide Email About Resilience We Are a Remote First Company But the CEO Keeps Flying Everyone to Headquarters for Mandatory Fun The Company Spent 47K on an Office Art Installation While Engineering Uses Laptops From 2017 My Job Title Is Chief Innovation Evangelist But I Just Retweet Tech News All Day We Switched to a 4 Day Work Week and Productivity Went Up Because Nobody Did Anything on Friday Anyway I Pitched a Startup That Does Absolutely Nothing and Got 47 Million in Funding We Raised a Series B and Immediately Spent It on an Office With a Slide The CTO Spends More Time on LinkedIn Than on the Actual Architecture Our Diversity Initiative Is a Stock Photo on the Careers Page The Company Retreat Was a Mandatory 3 Day Hackathon in a Windowless Warehouse We Are a Family Until the Runway Runs Out Then We Are a Restructuring The Interview Process Had 8 Rounds Including a Panel With the Board for a Junior Role Our Office Has a Meditation Room and Also 47 People Were Laid Off Via Email The Unlimited PTO Policy Means Nobody Ever Takes Vacation We Pivoted 14 Times in 6 Months and Now We Are an AI Company Somehow The All Hands Meeting Was Just the CEO Showing His NFT Collection for 90 Minutes Our OKRs Are So Ambitious We Just Make Up the Numbers at the End of the Quarter We Have a Chief Happiness Officer But No Chief Technology Officer The CEO Read a Blog Post About Flat Organizations So Now Nobody Reports to Anyone I Took a Pay Cut for Equity and the Equity Is Now Worth Less Than the Free Office Snacks Our Company Values Include Synergy But Nobody Knows What That Means

Tech Horror Stories

I Deployed on a Friday at 4 59 PM and Lived to Regret Every Life Choice That Led Me There The Load Balancer Was Sending All Traffic to the Staging Server for 6 Months and Users Preferred Staging Our Disaster Recovery Plan Was a Text File That Just Said Call Dave The Database Index Was Missing for 3 Years and We Only Noticed Because the Table Got Too Small Our Error Logging Service Went Down So We Had No Idea Everything Else Was Down Too I Ran a Load Test Against Production Thinking It Was Staging and the Site Handled It Better Than Expected Our Application Depends on a Package Maintained by a Single Developer in Belarus Who Has Gone Missing The Entire Backend Was a Set of Excel Macros That a Finance Intern Wrote in 2014 We Had Two Production Databases and Nobody Knew Which One Was Real The Cron Job That Was Supposed to Run Every Hour Has Been Running Every Second Since 2019 I Fixed a Typo in a Comment and the Entire Build Pipeline Broke Because CI Parses Comments as Config The Production SSH Key Was in a Public GitHub Repo for 4 Years and Nobody Noticed We Migrated From MySQL to Postgres to SQLite to MongoDB to a Google Sheet in 18 Months Our Entire Monitoring Stack Crashed Because It Generated Too Many Alerts About Itself I Pushed a Hotfix Using My Phone While at a Wedding and Now the Bride Is Not Speaking to Me The Firewall Rule Was Just an HTML Comment That Says Please Do Not Hack Us I Accidentally DoSed Our Own API with an Infinite Retry Loop and Called It Resilience Engineering Our Production Database Runs on a Raspberry Pi in a Bathroom and Nobody Knows I Replaced Our Entire Test Suite with console assert and Nobody Noticed for 6 Months The CDN Cached a 500 Error Page for 24 Hours and Our Site Was Just Broken for Everyone Our Monorepo Has 47 package json Files and Not a Single One Is Up to Date The Production Bug Only Happens When the CEO Is Looking at the Dashboard Our Redis Instance Ran Out of Memory and Started Evicting Auth Tokens of Logged In Users I Disabled CORS for Debugging and Forgot to Re enable It for 8 Months The Payment System Was Rounding Cents to the Nearest Dollar and Pocketing the Difference Since 2019 Our Rate Limiter Limited Legitimate Users While a Botnet Brute Forced Passwords for 6 Months The Intern Deployed to Production on Day One and It Went Better Than Our Usual Deploys I Ran rm rf on Production and the Only Backup Was a Screenshot The Backup System Was Backing Up the Backup Logs Not the Actual Data Our SSL Certificate Expired and Nobody Knew Because We Pinned the Old One I Found a Comment That Said Do Not Touch This and I Touched It The Database Migration That Never Ended: A 47 Hour Saga Our Legacy System Runs on a Mainframe That Requires a Blood Sacrifice to Reboot I Inherited a Codebase Where Every Function Is Called doTheThing