My previous job I did software development, testing, system integration, etc. Around 2010 or so a customer wanted us to develop a little embedded Linux video/mic device. They designed the hardware and gave us a schematic and needed us to do software. Our problem was we didn't have many people experienced with doing embedded Linux at that time. It was me and I think two other people who had any experience developing Linux drivers. But at the start of the project all of us were busy on other higher priority projects, the company took the project on anyway.

After a while it becomes obvious the project is going to be late, people are learning, but it's a slow process. After a few project leads had taken on the project, I finished the project I was on and was assigned to the embedded linux device project. The hope was that I would save the day given my record of helping people learn how to do things quickly. Unfortunately this project had too much to do, we weren't going to able to deliver on time, but perhaps we would be not too horribly late. Management kept saying the project was "like an onion, we're peeling back the layers, learning more, growing our skills, and getting a better understanding of what is going on."

One particularly tired and frustrated morning I'm talking with the team and I say "everyone keeps saying this project is like an onion and we're learning more. But it feels like this project is an onion that we're peeling and now realize it's a shark that's eating us." After that meeting one of the interns went back to his desk and created the Onionshark out of two pieces of clip art.

We did complete the project eventually, sort of. We had to look at the schematic to figure out what functionality to set to which pin of the SoC being used, but I was explicitly told many times not to pay attention to the parts of the schematic that weren't necessary to configure the system. I was early enough in my career and nervous enough about the project that I had listened to those instructions for a while. But something was bugging me so I looked at how everything was connected and realized that the video output of the device was wired up in a way that the SoC's pinmuxing could support. I told management about this and because we were already late on project delivery they talked it over with the customer, and we just handed over whatever we had and all agreed to call the project done.

This is the origin story of the Onionshark. The Onionshark is a monster that lurks at the heart of all poorly scoped projects and poorly understood technologies.