The Engineer’s Never-Gift Guide: Avoiding the nightmare before Christmas

‘Tis the season of giving, but it’s mostly the season of being battered with what to give.

Gift guides for the athlete in your life…

Gift guides for the whiskey lover in your life…

Gift guides for the vegan gamer in your life…

Do you really need your trusted open source provider’s opinion on slippers and headphones?

No, dear reader, you do not.

What you do need, though, is a way to avoid some of the supply chain security gotchas that often look like a gift at first, wrapped in nice paper and with a big bow. At the end of the day, these solutions are as much of a gift as a puppy: more work, more maintenance, more headaches, and fewer belly rubs. Consider these holiday metaphors for some (theoretical) gift ideas and their open source artifact stand-ins. While some may have had good intentions at one point, all are more nightmare-inducing than they are cheer-infusing in 2025.

Without further ado, an incomplete list of the toys that promise hours of fun but threaten to deliver years of technical debt and headaches:

1. The Off-Brand Power Wheels

It looked amazing in the online ad. A "luxury" electric ride-on car. Real hubcaps and aluminum fenders, too. But when you open the box, the tires are hard plastic, the motor smells like ozone, and the dashboard stickers are misspelled. You have no idea where the battery came from… and is it starting to smoke?

The problem: You should know what’s in your software. There’s no shortage of "secure" image catalogs that look premium on the outside but are closer to Frankenstein’s monster on the inside–stitched together from upstream binaries. Just like a haphazardly assembled electric truck, these open source artifacts are comprised of repackaged materials without any assurances of quality or guarantees of non-tampering. You think you're buying a secure vehicle. You paid for a secure vehicle. But you're getting a collection of mystery parts with questionable provenance.

The outcome: Cut corners and unnecessary risk. Aside from a potential waiting game for upstream maintainers to fix potential vulnerabilities, relying on copy-and-paste binaries introduces serious risk to your organization. Real-world attacks like xzutils have taken advantage of these gaps in the supply chain, and showcase why building directly from source is a critical control to prevent malicious code from wreaking far more havoc than a faulty toy truck battery.

2. The Self-Toppling Jenga Tower

It’s everyone’s favorite party game that turns your uncle into an armchair structural engineer! But this one has 40% of the blocks hollowed out to "save weight." It gets awfully tough to build the tower when what look like standard blocks are anything but, and even the slightest modification causes the whole thing to collapse.

The problem: Not in use doesn’t mean not required. "Black Box" debloating tools are designed to automatically rip out unused files to shrink the attack surface of a given container image. It sounds efficient until you realize that debloating leads to metadata corruption and long-term brittleness as container images and use cases evolve. Just like a questionable Jenga block, when you pull random software out of a container image based on guesswork, things tend to crumble.

The outcome: Workload instability and brittleness. You might save a few megabytes of space, but pay for it with app instability and a total overhaul of your existing CI/CD process. Massive, ongoing test suites are required just to ensure the "debloater" didn't delete your application's heartbeat.

3. The "Some Assembly Required" Bicycle

A cherry red bicycle. This thing even looks fast with the kickstand down, and the photo on the box is a real beaut. But when you crack open the cardboard, 193 individual parts, metric and imperial socket wrenches, and a sticky note reading "Good Luck!" stare right back at you.

The problem: Change management shouldn’t be “choose your own adventure.” Adopting a distroless approach for containerized workloads is a considerable shift. While there’s no shortage of minimal and lightweight operating systems, it’s essential to recognize that change management encompasses more than just technology. Engineering organizations need guarantees that the software they’re using will be updated, that it will have no CVEs, and that it will be reliable. Beyond the continuous updates and CVE SLAs, your teams will need thorough documentation and third-party expertise to make a migration successful. The bike might look great on the box, but it’s just a treasure hunt across your living room.

The outcome: Lost engineering hours and failed migrations. You save money on the license, but you pay for it in engineering toil. Your team spends their holidays trying to make a base image compatible with your app and waiting for the community to patch critical CVEs… which might happen today, next week, or never.

4. A Scale Replica of Some of the Golden Gate Bridge

Who doesn’t love a model kit of America’s most famous bridge? Of course, bridges usually require spanning both sides in order to meet the basic definition. It’s going to be tough to take those toy rush hour commuters across just one half of the bridge.

The problem: Limited coverage means limited upside. Choosing a trusted container image solution is a strategic decision. It not only impacts an organization’s engineering velocity, but also its security posture. Only covering a fraction of what engineering teams need is like half of a bridge: even with strong technical underpinnings, it can’t take an organization where they need to go.

The outcome: Increased complexity, slower total velocity. You may be able to check some low-hanging vulnerability boxes, but you’re introducing more technical debt, more fragmentation, and slower engineering outputs when application developers have to go outside the secure catalog to get their jobs done. Partial coverage isn't coverage; it's a bottleneck that forces complexity.

5. The "Infinite Whack-a-Mole" Game

At least it’s kind of a banger. While everyone loves the initial satisfaction that comes with knocking out a few overexuberant plastic moles, when the little creatures pop up faster every second, and the timer goes infinite, the game loses its charm. Fast.

The problem: Automation turns into alert fatigue. Automated vulnerability patching promises to automate your security every time a dependency needs an update. It sounds helpful, but it results in alert fatigue and endless operational toil to maintain reliability and stability.

The outcome: More tech debt and more total maintenance. Your developers turn into full-time patch managers. You never actually reach "zero CVEs," you just run faster on the hamster wheel, effectively taking on the role of a Linux distro maintainer yourself, all the while creating software that deviates further and further from the true upstream source.

6. The 1988 Encyclopedia Set

Ah, the smell of leather-bound books. That might actually be mildew? And that map with the USSR on it seems… dated. Encyclopedias might look great in an old study, but anything that’s out of date the second it’s printed sort of loses its appeal, especially in a world where continuously updated versions are available daily.

The problem: Slower updates, more packages, and more vulnerabilities. Traditional Linux distros, much like the encyclopedias of yesteryear, served an incredibly important purpose. But they are not designed for the way software is built today, arriving with the kitchen sink of software packages, only getting updates on distro maintainer schedules, and being designed to work best in a single ecosystem. Despite what Joey from “Friends,” might have shown us, Encyclopedia Britannica didn’t sell single-letter volumes, nor did they invite customers to mix and match Collier's editions along the way.

The outcome: Unnecessary risk and slowed performance. Your teams will get stuck shipping massive containers filled with vulnerabilities you can't fix and software you don't use. The result will be lower performance and higher CVEs, impacting both engineering throughput and potential risk.

The perfect gift: speed and flexibility

Like we said, we’re not in the business of telling you what you should get for that special engineer in your life. What we’re hoping to convey is how important it is to empower engineering with the tooling and tech that enables flexibility and velocity without limitations, bottlenecks, or lock-in.

To us that means:

• A massive catalog of trusted open source software artifacts;

• Cutting out middlemen and tampering by going directly to source with full provenance;

• Rebuilding and testing daily so artifacts are fresh and reliable;

• And delivering documentation and an expert team to help make you successful.

We happen to have a great deal of experience, and we’d be happy to help.

Happy Holidays from Chainguard!