It's Always DNS: I Started Turning Incident-Channel Jokes Into T-Shirts

Hey dev.to. First post here, so a quick intro: I work in tech, and for years my favourite writing has not been documentation. It has been the incident channel.

If you have ever been on a 2 a.m. call, you know the lines. They are short, they are true, and everybody on the call understands them instantly:

• "It's always DNS."
• "MFA is my love language."
• "Human in the loop."
• "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" (The eternal classic.)

A few weeks ago I started turning those lines into designs, mostly to see if I could. That experiment now has a name, Compile & Cotton, and a small shop of wearable inside jokes for people who build the internet.

How it actually works

People ask about the mechanics, so here is the honest version:

1. The lines come first. Every design starts as a phrase people in tech genuinely say. If it would not get a tired laugh on an incident call, it does not make the cut.
2. Print on demand does the heavy lifting. Designs go through Printify to an Etsy storefront. No inventory in my house, no boxes of unsold shirts judging me from the corner.
3. The range so far: a logo hoodie, twelve design hoodies, a nightwear line for women in tech (long tees: "404: Sleep Not Found", "Compiling Dreams", "Sleep Mode: ON"), and a bright colour line of the same nightwear designs.
4. It runs in the gaps. Full-time tech job, so this gets nights and weekends, roughly ten hours a week. Bootstrapped, no team, no funding.

Why post this here?

Two reasons. First, this community is literally the audience: if a line does not land with developers and sysadmins, it does not land anywhere. Second, I am learning ecommerce in public, and dev.to is generous with honest feedback.

Three questions I am genuinely stuck on

1. Designs or distribution? My instinct says distribution wins at this stage: showing up where tech people already gather beats a thirteenth design nobody sees. Agree or disagree?
2. Pricing sanity check. Hoodies at $44.99, tees at $39.99. Fair for the quality, or a quiet barrier?
3. Organic only. The plan is no paid ads through the end of the year. If you have grown anything, a project, a newsletter, a tiny shop, on organic alone, what actually moved the needle?

The shop is linked in my profile if you want to see the designs themselves. Blunt feedback is the most useful kind, so do not hold back.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for every 2 a.m. call that wrote these lines for me.