There is always a best practice. There are usually several. They are mutually exclusive.

⚖️ Everyone is right somewhere

Every character is an extreme that is genuinely correct inside a limited scope. Riley is right that you have 400 users. Alex is right that you will not have 400 users forever. The joke is never that someone is stupid: it is what happens when a good reason is pushed one step past its scope.

So there are no villains and no idiots. If one side of a story is obviously wrong, it is not a story, it is a rant, and we don’t publish rants.

🎯 Then we say where the middle is

A comic is a snapshot of two people being right at each other. Under each story we explain why both sides were right, and suggest a few sweet spots: the advice a calm senior colleague would give after the meeting. We call that colleague Super Reasonable. It never appears in the comic, because nobody calm ever does.

🔬 How a story gets in

Every draft is scored on six questions, 0 to 2 each, and needs 9 out of 12 to ship:

1. A moment, not a topic. A Slack message, a meeting sentence, a dashboard you saw this month.
2. Both sides are loyal. Each defends a real interest: risk, cost, speed, users, focus.
3. A concrete artifact. A number, a file name, a screenshot-able screen.
4. The turn nobody priced in. The last beat is a consequence, not a restatement.
5. A quotable punch. One sentence true beyond this story.
6. The tag test. You know which coworker you would send it to.

Most drafts don’t make it. The ones that almost do are redrawn, compressed, or quietly retired.

🧮 Fairness, counted

The cast is six women and six men, and we count who gets to be right. Every published story records which character holds the winning argument, the losing one, and the punchline, and we audit the totals by character and by gender so nobody becomes the permanent joke or the permanent hero. Topics are checked the same way: every camp needs a real reason, in the character’s own words.

🎭 The cast is fictional

The twelve characters are composites of habits, not portraits of people. If you recognize your coworker, that is the point; if you recognize yourself, that is growth. We don’t write about identifiable private individuals.

🎟️ Guests

Occasionally a visitor drops in: a consultant, a vendor, a public figure from the tech world. Public figures may appear as clearly satirical guests. We won’t present invented dialogue as a factual quote, imply endorsement, or make the cast depend on celebrity cameos.

🏷️ Real technology, fair game

Kubernetes, Postgres, cron, spreadsheets and the rest are named because the arguments about them are real. We joke about choices and incentives, never about the people who build those tools.

🖋️ How it’s made

Scripts are written and edited by hand against the rubric above. The drawings are generated with AI image models from those scripts and the characters’ reference portraits, then checked one by one for wrong faces, wrong sides and misspelled numbers. Rejected drawings are redrawn, not patched. The merch in the shop is drawn into the comics, and does not exist yet.

🔒 No tracking

We count visits with Simple Analytics: no cookies, no personal data, no fingerprinting. We only want to know which stories you send to your coworkers.

✍️ Corrections

Found a typo, a wrong number or a face that belongs to someone else? Our visiting consultant Bertrand has probably already noted it, with the line number. We fix errors in the drawing itself, and when a story is rewritten, the old version is archived, not erased.