Binge watching myself

As always, I'm rather late to the party.

But, anyhow, I've finally got around to starting to watch HBO's superb new comedy, Silicon Valley.

In addition to being flat-out laugh-out-loud funny, it's also accurate.

Really, really, painfully, accurate.

I'm only finishing up the first season (they're working on the 4th season now), so I'm rather behind, but it's already amazing how many moments, in every single episode, ring true: "yes, yes! I remember when that exact thing happened to me!"

One downside of the show is that if it isn't actually a show about you (that is, if you're not actually a software developer who lives in Silicon Valley), many of the topical references and inside jokes may go right past you.

So if you're a newcomer to the show, and trying to get grounded, or if you've been watching it and wondering: "what they heck are they talking about? Who, exactly, are they parodying this time?", you might find this helpful: Uncanny Silicon Valley: The absolutely definitive, supremely authoritative, person-to-person mapping of “Silicon Valley” characters to real tech world personalities..

Nearly anyone in west coast tech will attest to the show’s eerie verisimilitude, even when (or especially when) the fictional characters embody the worst traits of brogrammers, wantrepreneurs, and VC sociopaths. Silicon Valley is nearly a simulacrum of Sand Hill Road, or as the CEO of Snapchat described it, “basically a documentary.”

...

Clearly, we need a cheat sheet to decode this farrago of fact and fiction. So here it is, The Official Guide to SVCU (Silicon Valley Cinematic Universe)

Or, perhaps, maybe you just had to have lived it, in order to "get" it.