On being manly

The Ford F-series was the best selling car in North America of 2025. These machines are marketed as Serious Cars, for Serious, Working Men. (Or Ladies! I try to not be predjudiced.) Men who do REAL work. Men who are on the jobsite by dawn and, I don't know, punch concrete all day. No-nonsense men with leather hands who need to haul really heavy things.

Yes, REAL MEN. This is too much car for your average pencil pusher or bean counter to handle. And yet, how come I know so many LLM-prompters who drive these things?

Does the extra cost (and these things are expensive!) really make up for the occasional added convenience of having a truck? Do you really need to drive this thing to your office job?

I think for most people the answer is a big fat NO. There are times where having a large truck is "nice", but for you average 9-5 office worker, this doesn't really occur that often.

I also think most people would agree that office workers who buy the newest F-150 KING RANCH trim do so for aspirational reasons. Having a big truck fits nicely into many peoples idea of what they'll be and solves the perceived problems they'll have down the line. They want to be associated with Serious Work, even though this makes little sense given their material realities. Sure, it's kind of overkill for dropping off you kids and buying groceries, but when you finally buy that land and start building your own house you'll definitely appreciate it! Cost and gas mileage be damned.

On being a programmer

I think it's easy to scoff at how cringe the truck stuff is. It's a completely different world from programming and if you're not used to it then absurd actually seems absurd.

BUT we are also very cringe. Just think about all the "Scale" marketing we're exposed to...

You, yes YOU, need to make sure you website is scalable. When your website blows up (and of course it will!) you'll need to make sure your website can handle all those payment requests. You aren't making just another SaaS app. No, you're making the Next Big Thing, and your architecture should reflect that. Kubernetes, horizontal scaling, database sharding, Cloud, etc. Nevermind the operational footprint, you'll be rich and just hire a couple of Ops guys to handle this for you.

K8s was borne out of Google's problems; but are Google's problems your problems?

Once again, I think most people would say NO. And yet, dear reader, how come we still drive the the proverbial F-150 that is Kubernetes?

These technologies are what I call "aspirational" technologies. You use it because that's where you'll be going. Nevermind the operational footprint and extra time spent learning it.

I've encountered a bunch of sayings to to address this kind of situation: YAGNI (You aren't gonna need it), or KISS (Keep it simple, stupid). But I've totally also encountered situations like: "Oh, well everyone uses K8s anyway, we should just KISS and use that".

When evaluating techonlogies, I think it's better to peel one more layer of this onion and think more deeply about the context the technology was created in.

My thought process goes like so: