Atlas · Humor · 21 entries
Humor
I love writing stuff that makes me laugh. And I love going back and being able to laugh at my old jokes, and think, "did I really say that?" So a good half of my work has at least one decent joke in it. But here I figured I'd curate the ones that pack in more jokes for your dollar.
Some of these pieces are just for pure laughs, usually poking fun at stuff. Programming languages and video games make easy targets. But others, like Revenge of the Junior Developer, and the Google Platforms Rant, are quite serious, and are still cited by experts today as some of the funniest shit they've ever read.
- ★ Essentials
- 👍 Good read
- 💩 Not worth it
- 🤓 Language nerd
- 😄 Humor
- 📚 Story / fiction
- 🕹️ Gaming
- 🔮 Called it
- 🤡 Whiffed it
-
2025
Revenge of the Junior Developer
The sequel to The Death of the Junior Developer. AI coding is rolling through six overlapping waves toward agent fleets — and the developers who adapt fastest, not the most senior, are the ones who come out ahead.
-
2023
RAG to Riches
An end-of-2023 news roundup. The famous bear-spray-engineers bit is the cover joke, but the real news is that Cody just shipped GA — and Steve makes the case that good retrieval, not bigger models, is what now separates serious coding assistants from toys.
-
2023
A Good Day With Jeff
An Amazon offsite at Jeff's boathouse, circa 2004. I'm there to help brainstorm using ML for operations. The technology isn't ready and none of us know it yet. I helpfully suggest Mechanical Turk; the room reacts as if I'd farted. I make our CIO laugh at the wrong moment during Jeff's prepared remarks. At lunch I compliment the wall stereo and Jeff — "instantly very animated" — shows me every feature, including the speaker wires running through the ornamental ceiling chains.
-
2023
Cheating Is All You Need
Written a few months after ChatGPT shipped, this is the essay where Steve — a programmer with a long, well-earned skeptical streak — went all-in in public. It demolishes the "you can't trust AI code" objection, reframes AI coding as a search problem, and names the "data moat" that the entire retrieval era would spend the next two years chasing.
-
2018
Get That Job at Grab
Half labor-market broadside (global demand for engineers has outrun supply, so go look around), half interview-prep advice (breadth-first beats depth-first, one mulligan per candidate), with a closing parable Steve calls the Steve Buscemi Test about candidates who literally couldn't count to a million.
-
2017
Why Kotlin Is Better Than Whatever Dumb Language You're Using
Steve set out to port his game Wyvern to Android, hit Android's notoriously bad APIs, nearly quit, and was rescued by a new JVM language from JetBrains. The essay is the conversion story: why Kotlin, built IDE-first and "just butter," won him over when fifty other languages hadn't — and why he, a self-described blue-collar working programmer, wants street food, not the truffled snails of Scala and Clojure.
-
2012
The Borderlands 2 Gun Discarders Club
Borderlands 2 produces 87 bazillion guns and then gives you room to keep about twelve — so the collecting economy that made the first game work collapses. Steve's diagnosis: Gearbox built a gun-collector's game without building a way to collect guns. The fix a programmer reaches for instinctively is a database. A sequel that proves the first essay's design argument by watching a studio get it wrong.
-
2011
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
An internal Google+ post from October 2011 that a permissions slip made public. Under the leak is the argument that a company's fate turns on whether it builds platforms or products — and the seven-point Bezos mandate, written out crisply here for the first time, that the industry has quoted ever since.
-
2011
eBay Patents 10-Click Checkout
A parody of Amazon's 1-Click patent. Where 1-Click removed all friction, eBay's "10-click Buy It Now" patents the friction itself — a ten-step ordeal of repeated logins, upsells, and password mismatches. Backed by a list of rejected fake patent claims, it is the most Onion-style piece Steve ever wrote, and underneath it a UX rant about dark patterns and monopolies that no longer have to care.
-
2010
Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit
The conceit runs on arithmetic. Every Haskell post on reddit gets exactly 38 upvotes from a 37-person mailing list — so there must be precisely one lurker, and the community sets out to find him — only to learn his devotion is strictly theoretical. A gentle, affectionate skewering of a language famous for being brilliant and unused.
-
2010
WikiLeaks to Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed
Filed deadpan from Iceland, the report announces that WikiLeaks will re-release thousands of open-source Java projects with all access modifiers made public and every deprecation tag removed. The target is the Java habit of treating private as a sacred right — the developer who insists you may never open a door in your own house, even in an emergency, even decades after they are gone. The healthier alternative, voiced at the end: we're all adults here.
-
2010
Blogger Finger
The first half is a comic essay on quitting: he had cared too much, the haters got through, and he came back with the hard-won perspective that nothing on earth makes everyone happy. The second half is the story behind the title — he developed trigger finger in his right hand from practising a Villa-Lobos guitar étude an estimated 650,000 times in five months. More confessional and raw than his other humor pieces.
-
2008
Fable II: Arguably Better than Getting Your Head Crapped On
Steve structures his takedown of Fable II as numbered Lowlights and Highlights — and runs out of good things to say at Highlight #8, which he lists anyway as another Lowlight. His point: a game can be flawless in engineering, art, and sound and still be ruined by juvenile, tasteless creative direction. Craft cannot save bad taste. The one thing he genuinely loved was the loyal in-game dog.
-
2008
Business Requirements are Bullshit
The companion piece to Good Agile, Bad Agile two years earlier. The argument is blunt: the entire industry of formal requirements gathering is built on a category error, and almost every artefact it produces is somewhere between useless and actively harmful. The cover is the joke compressed: the scroll ends in the wastebasket.
-
2008
Get That Job at Google
Steve finally gave in and wrote the interview-prep post he had been dodging for years, knowing it would draw flames. Underneath the comedy is genuine service journalism: study a data-structures book, run mock whiteboard interviews, know Big-O cold, know your graphs — and understand that a rejection from a high-false-negative-rate company is often just noise, not a verdict on you.
-
2007
Stevey's Tech News, Issue #1
A run of fake industry headlines in straight newsroom voice — the content is unhinged, the delivery deadpan. The format is the joke.
-
2007
A Noogler's View of Google
Recycled in 2007 from Steve's Google-internal blog — four diary entries from his first weeks on campus in 2005. The badge picture taken at the exact wrong moment. The ball-pit accident in Building 42. Kirkland's Microsoft refugees finally writing code. And the recurring suspicion that the free food means Google is going to eat him.
-
2006
Egomania Itself
Steve's case: Agile "works" only in the trivial sense that hard work works — you can start with dog shit, add enough chili, and call the result chili. He recasts the methodology as superstition, a belief that propagates through the brain's pattern-matching machinery like the urban-legend chicken that learned a useless twist alongside its trick. The post closes on an anagram that has long outlived the post itself.
-
2006
Anime for the Nonplussed
Steve and his wife Linh watched Spirited Away, then everything Miyazaki, then asked a 19-year-old at Suncoast for a recommendation, and twelve months and roughly 150 DVDs later Steve is delivering a Top 10 list: Haibane Renmei, Last Exile, Fullmetal Alchemist, Twelve Kingdoms, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Scrapped Princess, Witch Hunter Robin, Wolf's Rain, Gunslinger Girl, Gankutsuou. No thesis, no industry argument, no programming. Just the obsessive consumer's report, with a Jeff Bezos digression in the middle on why Amazon stopped trying to be the world's biggest book/music/video retailer.
-
2006
Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns
A 2006 essay disguised as a fairy tale. In the Kingdom of Javaland, verbs are slaves — every action must be wrapped in a noun, a Manager or a Factory or an Executor, before it is allowed out in public. Steve tells the story deadpan, and the joke became the standard critique of object-oriented overreach.
-
2004
A Software Fable
Steve treats Fable as the excuse to inventory all the roles that exist in games and don't exist at Amazon — producers, directors, voice actors, motion-capture actors, the army of trained-but-unemployed 3D artists — and to tell stories (second-hand, via a friend at EA) about the producer-driven always-in-demo-mode game-engine treadmill. The second half is the part that earns it a place in the Drunken canon: the argument that no one in software engineering has ever agreed on a calibration system because they have all overlooked the only one everyone already understands, which is the D&D level.
