Forrest Brazeal
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forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Forrest Brazeal
@forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
4.6K followers 650 following 290 posts
Cofounder at Freeman & Forrest, author, cartoonist, and Pwnie Award-winning songwriter. Ex-Google. Here to help.
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forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Apparently the Girl Scouts now give out corporate-sponsored badges which you can earn by completing key life skills challenges like going to see Gabby’s Dollhouse The Movie.

Seems fine
A screenshot from the Girl Scout website showing the “exclusive Gabby’s Dollhouse patch”
September 29, 2025 at 11:18 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
at last, a sign that will REALLY piss off your Southern neighbors
In this house, we believe: Cornbread should be sweet BBQ means grilling burgers A crockpot makes perfectly fine pulled pork You eat fried chicken with a knife and fork Sweet tea is gross Grits are just oatmeal with cheese
September 15, 2025 at 7:04 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
May all of our future Wikipedia intros go this hard
Screenshot of Henry Louis Gates’ Wikipedia page. “He was a pioneer in the use of the X-ray machine and psychological warfare.”
September 2, 2025 at 12:36 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
the vibes are shifting

bullish on professional software engineers
A Venn diagram with three overlapping pink circles on a blue background. The top left circle is labeled “Vibe Coders,” the top right circle is labeled “Rodeo Cowboys,” and the bottom circle is labeled “Prisoners.” In the “Vibe Coders” circle: “Given way too much rope.” In the “Rodeo Cowboys” circle: “Given just enough rope.” In the “Prisoners” circle: “Not allowed to have rope.” Where Vibe Coders and Rodeo Cowboys overlap: “High risk tolerance.” Where Vibe Coders and Prisoners overlap: “Ordered around by disembodied voices.” Where Rodeo Cowboys and Prisoners overlap: “Get their exercise in a fenced yard.” Where all three overlap in the center: “Unlikely to deliver production-grade software.” Credit in the bottom left corner: “@forrestbrazeal.”
August 21, 2025 at 3:37 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
It's time to play: entertainment law firm or "Modern Major General" lyric?
Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner Auerbach Hynick Jaime LeVine Sample & Klein
August 5, 2025 at 8:32 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
A random but somehow perfect fact:

Edward Packard, creator and frequent author of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series, is the grandfather of Superman actor David Corenswet.
The Cave of Time cover, by Edward Packard Pa Kent tells Superman that his choices define him in this screen grab from Superman (2025)
August 1, 2025 at 8:42 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
There is only one answer
The cover of the novelization of Disney’s Treasure Planet
August 1, 2025 at 2:01 AM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Time to start recommending underrated books on this account.

Reply with a genre, I’ll give you a rec.
A paperback copy of The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
July 31, 2025 at 9:02 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
presented without comment
A comic depicts two office workers talking. One, standing next to a cubicle labeled "CUBE-301," says, "Our team treats AI like a junior software engineer." The other, sitting in a chair, responds, "Cool, so — you ignore it for long periods, give it confusing, arbitrary tasks, and then scapegoat it when it fails?" The first replies enthusiastically, "You nailed it!" The background is bright green. The comic is signed "@forrestbrazeal".
June 13, 2025 at 3:45 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
the only honest SaaS comparison chart
A humorous chart titled "Every Competitor Comparison" contrasts "Our Amazing Product" with "Their Steaming Pile" across several categories. Both have logos. "Our Amazing Product" checks all boxes: does industry-standard things, includes a proprietary widgetron, is developed by handsome geniuses—but ironically, does not make money. The competitor partially does industry-standard things (with a note: "*we will not elaborate") and fails at everything else. Created by @forrestbrazeal.
May 12, 2025 at 1:55 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
The opening crawl to Star Wars Episode 1 seems to capture our current moment pretty well
April 7, 2025 at 1:03 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
When I drew this cartoon several years ago, it was meant to be random absurdity, not satire
Single panel cartoon with caption "If Doctors Worked Like Sysadmins". Doctor asks "Is this machine still necessary?" while gesturing to an important-looking piece of medical equipment hooked up to a patient. A nurse replies: "No idea - let's unplug it and see who screams"
March 6, 2025 at 3:03 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
My wife has convinced me to start a TikTok account where I do nothing but talk about my collection of old children’s books. www.tiktok.com/@childrensbo...
March 6, 2025 at 2:16 AM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
I'm going to business hell for this one
A "demystified" Gartner hype cycle graph including points like "trough of zero real adoption" and "slope of enterprise marketers jumping on the bandwagon too late"
February 14, 2025 at 10:16 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
This is the wildest screenshot I've ever shared in my life.

Somehow, my debut novel has sold to Ballantine / Penguin Random House.

The elevator pitch is simple: what if Silicon Valley invented the time machine?

Look for the book in stores next year! newsletter.goodtechthings.com/p/breaking-s...
Deal announcement from Publisher's Marketplace for my debut novel, THE BLEB PROJECT
February 7, 2025 at 6:53 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Forgot I drew this one. Deeply pleased with it tbh
"The ARRs of cloud migration" - a pirate illustrates the various forms of a cloud migration such as Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, etc
February 7, 2025 at 3:06 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
oh. oh no
A cartoon featuring two characters, a naive newer employee and a jaded one who seems to have been around awhile. Newbie: "Hey can we get approval to purchase this ops tool that will make our jobs easier and faster?" Veteran: "Hmm. Let me tell you a story. When I was hired here, they gave me an older Macbook Pro, the kind with the butterfly keyboard. Within 3 months it had slowed to a crawl and the "E" key had stopped working." Newbie: "What did you do?" Vet: "I asked for an upgrade but they said I wasn't due for another 33 months. So I remapped 'E' to my '+' key, which really hosed my words per minute. Also now I have no '+', so anytime I write a regex I go online and copy one from the '+' article on Wikipedia." (They pause for a beat, staring at each other) Vet: "Do you want to trade laptops?"
February 6, 2025 at 2:26 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Nvidia claims they're called "NVIDIA" but even Wikipedia doesn't believe it.
A 2-axis graph of "how hard it is to capitalize the company's name correctly" and "how mad people get if you mess it up." VMware is in the top right.
January 30, 2025 at 9:19 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
cruel and unusual
harry potter is eating lunch. an owl flies up with a letter. harry opens it eagerly. it's a howler. it screams at him: YOU HAVE FAILED A CORPORATE PHISHING TEST
January 14, 2025 at 10:42 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
I have a long history of explaining disaster recovery with Oz.
A page from my 2020 book "The Read Aloud Cloud", showing Dorothy and Toto taking refuge in a storm cellar labeled "Data Backup Cellar" as a tornado sucks up their data center. The rhyming text on the page reads: If failover fails, to your great consternation, You're in a DISASTER RECOVERY situation, And you'd just better hope you have backups on hand To help with the careful restores that you planned. (You MUST test your backups. If not, you have sinned And your customers' data Is lost in the wind.)
January 13, 2025 at 4:04 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Rubrik asked me to draw a promotional image for the webinar I'm doing with them on January 28. This is what I drew.
Dorothy's house has landed on the wicked witch of the East. A skeptical Munchkin says: "Well kid, she MAY be dead ... but I happen to know she replicates snapshots to a backup witch in oz-west-2."
January 13, 2025 at 3:59 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
good morning and welcome to 2025
This is a humorous diagram depicting common elements of cloud architecture, drawn in a casual sketch style. It's organized into several sections: At the top: "Global Assumptions" contains various services connected through a "Frickin' Slick Reverse Proxy" with "CIDR Shenanigans" and a "VPN of Sadness." Middle section: Features "CONTAINERS!!!" with stylized container icons and includes: "Cool Databases" "Event Bus" flowing directly into someone's "RÉSUMÉ" "Real Database" with "Midnight Heroics" and a complex pipeline labeled "The Data Engineers Got Very Excited Here" Bottom section: "Blame Radius" showing different service categories: "Services that Start Stuff" "Services that Stop Stuff" "Services that Like to Watch" "One Tiny Cron Job that Keeps Everything from Failing Apart" Ends with "Data Lake" flowing into "Data Swamp" The image is credited to @forrestbrazeal and uses a light-hearted tone to poke fun at typical cloud architecture complexities.
January 6, 2025 at 4:20 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
Not enough people know that Shel Silverstein not only started out as a magazine cartoonist, but he drew what gets my vote as the greatest single-panel cartoon of all time. (Look Magazine, 1956)

Even in the most ridiculous situations, the human spirit perseveres.

Happy 2025.
Two prisoners dangle from a wall in chains, in a completely hopeless situation. One says to the other: “Now here’s my plan…”
December 31, 2024 at 10:52 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
I am spending as much time this Christmas as possible in my library, libraryrotting
December 27, 2024 at 5:01 PM
forrestbrazeal.bsky.social
As a kid when I read about artillery shells I just assumed they were shaped like this. Part of me still believes it.
A pile of pasta shells
December 23, 2024 at 12:26 AM