





Pour Mountain Dew onto your shirt (as a sugary adhesive) and then cover yourself in crushed Doritos, proclaiming to be the crumbs in a coworker’s keyboard. Create a noose from some spare cable and put it around your neck. When somebody asks what you are, state that you are the [fill in blank] server that’s always hanging for no good reason. Find that one guy in your office with anime figures and steal a few of them from his elevated shelf. Then, paint their faces with printer ink and walk around with them, boldly announcing to be the proud parent process of several zombie children. (Avoid the actual owner of the figures for the entire duration of the party.) Print out three copies of a cute puppy’s face found on the Internet, align them in a row, and tape them to your head. Afterwards, create a collar from a network cable and attach a large name tag which says “Kerberos the Happy Scrappy Hero Authentication“. Empty one of your rectangular wastebaskets, draw the face of a demon on its side, and don it on your head to parade around as a corrupted USB stick. If you and a fellow programmer are feeling a little adventurous, create a ‘cat-o-nine tails’ from the spare mice in the hardware closet and create a spiked paper collar using paper and staples. Now, with one person wielding the tails and with one person wearing the collar, be the sensation of your event by attending as a MongoDB master and slave configuration.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.