> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.
Which sounds insane until you realise that you’ve just described in outline something very like the iron dome missile defence system, which actually exists in reality.
(And of course you’ll get no argument from me that it’s insane that such things need to exist at all, but such is the world we live in.)
I'll bolster it. I've worked on a site-you-have-heard-of. They were struggling and as a response they would change marketing leadership basically every year to try to find a new way to reach a new or different demographic. Every year the new marketing leader would say "we're not doing any of that previous idiot's strategy, as I am the one who knows best". And as each marketer tried to make their mark, 50 new Google Tag Manager script injects would appear.
Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO.
And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).
this is batshit insane, yet I believe it