Meeting Driven Development

When the PM says "make sure your documentation is thorough," and you take it literally. Nothing says developer energy like documenting the painfully obvious while completely ignoring the complex parts of your codebase. "How to use this API? Figure it out yourself. How to open a pizza box? Let me write you a dissertation." Ten years in the industry and I've yet to see documentation that isn't either stating the absolute obvious or so cryptic it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. The middle ground simply doesn't exist in our universe.

Sometimes you're not revolutionary, just disorganized. That company with a single massive repo wasn't practicing "advanced DevOps strategy" - they just never figured out how to separate concerns. Now tech bros are calling it "monorepo architecture" and writing Medium articles about it. Congratulations, your technical debt just became a LinkedIn certification.

Isn't it just wonderful how tech culture works? You can pull 80-hour weeks, sacrifice your social life, and earn that "Senior Distinguished Principal Architect" title with the compensation package to match... but push one tiny commit with a missing semicolon at 2 AM and that's your legacy forever. The industry has this magical ability to forget all your achievements but maintain a detailed historical record of that time you accidentally deployed to production instead of staging. Your Git blame is eternal, but your Git praise? Practically nonexistent. Next time someone asks why developers have impostor syndrome, just point them to this meme and walk away slowly.

The initial joy when a client approves your design is like that brief moment between deployments when everything works perfectly. Then comes the inevitable "but I want some changes" and suddenly you're Iron Man after the battle—broken, defeated, and questioning your life choices. The real superpower isn't coding—it's maintaining your will to live after the 47th round of "minor tweaks" that somehow involve rebuilding the entire architecture.

The grim reaper of deadlines doesn't discriminate. You start with TypeScript errors leaving a bloody trail, ignore some linter warnings because "they're just suggestions," watch your unit tests fail spectacularly, and then—with the sweet smell of caffeine and desperation in the air—you just ship that monstrosity anyway. The compiler screams, the tests weep, but the deadline laughs. It's not technical debt at this point; it's a technical mortgage with predatory interest rates that future-you will somehow have to refinance.

Game development in a nutshell: level designers toss narrative designers a chaotic mess three months before launch, then casually say "make it make sense." Meanwhile, narrative folks are just stock market traders screaming internally "WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CHANGED THE LEVEL? WE RECORDED THE DIALOGUE YESTERDAY!" The true art of game storytelling is retroactively justifying whatever random level elements the designers decided to throw in at the last minute. It's basically professional fanfiction writing under extreme duress.