The night watch by James Mickens is one of the funniest things I have read recently.
It talks about the struggles of system engineers in a fun and accessible way.
I won’t summarize because:
My favorite paragraph:
You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.