Places worth following. The ones whose license allows adaptation are lettered here; the others do not allow it, so their strips stay on their own sites and are explained here in our own words.
Stick figures on romance, sarcasm, math and language, three times a week since 2006. Every strip carries hover text, which often holds a second joke. The standard reference for an argument settled with a comic.
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Is It Worth the Time?A table of how long you can spend automating a routine task before it costs more time than it saves.
Data PipelineThe pipeline everyone relies on, and where it actually runs; the hover text finishes the joke.
A geek comic by a software developer. Linux processes are penguins with PID badges, and kernels, shells and package managers get personalities. The best strips explain the mechanism while they joke about it.
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the depressed developerThe first part of a series: a developer slumped on the floor is woken by his own code, now a spiny monster.
Painted one-panel jokes for web developers from the team behind the Browserling cross-browser testing service: front end versus back end, Vim, race conditions, spaghetti code. Each strip is a pun or a one-liner, drawn with far more care than the joke strictly needs.
Cartoons about tech companies and the people who work in them. Best known for "Organizational Charts", which drew six tech giants as six org charts. The author's own terms allow translations, as long as the credit and a link sit next to the drawing and the signature stays.
An anonymous strip about math, science and geek culture. The original site went offline in 2023; a community archive on GitHub keeps the comics and the license they were published under. The author never gave a name.
A daily gag strip that keeps returning to physics, math, economics and philosophy, usually with a final panel that undercuts the setup. Each comic also has a hidden bonus panel behind a button.
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How to Spot a PhysicistA museum detects physicists with one sign: "Today: Interactive Dark Matter Exhibit!"
Life in graduate school: advisors, procrastination, funding and the thesis that never ends. Not about software, but anyone who has worked on a long project with an unclear finish line will recognise it.
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The Science News CycleA correlation with caveats, passed through a press office, wire services, blogs and cable news, until your grandma wears a tin-foil hat.
Philosophers argue and misbehave, and many strips come with a short note on the idea behind the joke. Not about programming, but anyone who has argued about whether a model "understands" anything will find their arguments here, already drawn.
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Turing TestA machine passes a Turing test judged against dogs, and the grant application practically writes itself.Our explainer →
Office life of a software team, drawn mostly through a round-headed figure in a blue shirt up against bugs, deadlines, estimates and production. Short, tightly paced jokes about the daily work itself.
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// TODOA TODO marked REMOVE, drawn as a sprout nobody pulls until its roots have broken the ground.Our explainer →
Alex Papadimoulis (founder); Remy Porter (editor-in-chief)since 2004
ActiveExplained here
Not a comic: daily stories, sent in by readers, of code and IT decisions gone wrong, written up as "your how-not-to guide for developing software". The name of this site owes it something.
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The Brillant Paula BeanA contractor reports steady progress until the deadline; her entire contribution turns out to be one Java class holding the string "Brillant".Our explainer →
Etienne Issartial (art), Thomas Gx (stories); English by Mark Nightingalesince 2012
QuietExplained here
"The blog relating the daily life of web agency developers", written in French and translated into English. Clients, specs, side projects and production incidents, most of them recognisable from any agency or product team. New strips have been rare since 2022.
Non-commercial use with link and creditYou can use our strips for any non-commercial purpose. You can use them to illustrate an article or a blog post, as long as you aren't just duplicating our content for the sake of it. In all cases, a link to the strip and attribution to us is required.