Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Of course. A blog post about "Brainrot" from a guy who used to write about distributed systems. This is going to have the same level of insightful, grounded-in-reality analysis as our last all-hands on "synergistic, cross-functional paradigm shifts." I’m sure the kids are alright. The real question is whether the systems they’re inheriting will be.
It’s the line, “I usually write about distributed systems and databases,” that really got me. Ah, yes. That voice. The one that could stand in front of a whiteboard and explain a revolutionary, multi-region architecture without mentioning that the entire thing relied on a single, undocumented Python script written by an intern who left in 2018.
He thinks he’s discovered some profound truth about Gen Z, but every single one of his "brainrot" terms reads like a post-mortem of a project I wasted two years of my life on.
He is cooked: This is what we all whispered when the new VP of Product unveiled "Project Bedrock," a complete rewrite of the core platform that was supposed to take six months. It’s been three years. The project is cooked. The budget is cooked. Anyone still assigned to it is, in fact, absolutely cooked.
Let him cook: The exact phrase our CTO used when that one principal engineer insisted he could replace our entire messaging queue with his own implementation written in Haskell over a long weekend. We let him cook, alright. He cooked up a three-day global outage and a five-alarm fire in the SRE department.
Aura: This is just what the marketing department calls it when the CEO gives a keynote at a conference. They spend a month aura-farming on social media, talking up our "category-defining innovation," while engineering is patching a critical SQL injection vulnerability found by a teenager on Twitter. The aura is strong, but the query sanitizer is weak.
"They have short attention spans for things they do not care about. I think they do this out of sincerity."
This hits a little too close to home. You know what else gets a sincere lack of attention?
But hey, he says they can "lock in (focus) on what they care about." Sure. Like refactoring a perfectly functional microservice for the fifth time to use a new JavaScript framework that just came out last week, all while the primary database is buckling under load and the on-call pager is screaming into the void. Priorities.
The most laughable part is this gem: "From the outside, their culture may look absurd and chaotic. But, under the memes, I see a group that feels deeply, adapts quickly, and learns in public. They are improvising in real time."
Replace "their culture" with "our engineering department" and you have the most honest sentence ever written about the company. "Adapts quickly" is a funny way of saying "the roadmap changes every two weeks based on whichever customer yells the loudest." "Learns in public" is a fantastic euphemism for "our customers are our beta testers." And "improvising in real time" is exactly what you do when you realize the failover strategy you designed on a napkin doesn’t actually, you know, fail over.
"This post insisted on being written through me," he says. Some things are better left unwritten, my friend. Like that internal memo admitting our "infinitely scalable" storage solution was just three RAID arrays stacked on top of each other in a closet.
Anyway, this was a charming read. A real peek behind the curtain. Thanks for the content, but I think I’ll stick to your technical posts. At least when those are based on a complete fantasy, they come with diagrams. Don't worry, I won't be checking back.