What Went Right (Nothing Went Wrong)

The road to shipping a game is like that curved road sign that never actually curves. You're cruising along thinking "just one more feature" and somehow that finished game is perpetually around a corner that doesn't exist. Feature creep is the GPS that keeps recalculating to "5 more years away." Meanwhile your deadline passed three energy drinks ago and your team is surviving on pizza and broken dreams.

Ah, the eternal struggle between "vibe coding" and actual software engineering. Someone's looking for a fun name for writing code with proper standards and discipline, and the reply just cuts straight to the truth bomb: it's called "software engineering" – you know, that boring thing we were all hired to do before we discovered keyboard RGB lighting and lofi beats to code to. The "Coding with capital C" suggestion is particularly painful because we all know that person who treats variable naming like an existential crisis. Meanwhile, actual production code continues to run on caffeine, Stack Overflow copies, and the tears of whoever has to maintain it next.

The holy trinity of "things that don't matter" according to people who have them in abundance. Rich folks saying money doesn't matter, attractive people claiming looks don't matter, and then the punchline – senior engineers at standups mumbling "no updates" while secretly working on the same bug for 3 days straight. Nothing says "leave me alone with my code" like the blank stare of a developer who'd rather debug in peace than explain why they're still wrestling with that one-line fix that should've taken 10 minutes. The daily standup: where developers perfect the art of saying absolutely nothing while looking productive.

The Code Refactor holds the One Ring of power—the ability to clean up that spaghetti mess and make everything beautiful. The Product Manager, channeling their inner Sauron, demands you "throw it in the release, deploy it!" because deadlines wait for no hobbit. But the Dev, wise and battle-scarred, simply responds with a firm "No." Because shipping a half-baked refactor to production is basically volunteering to spend your weekend firefighting bugs while the PM enjoys brunch. Sometimes the greatest power move is knowing when NOT to release the Kraken.

The career trajectory no one warns you about: You start as a passionate coder, slinging elegant solutions and building cool stuff. Fast forward five years, and suddenly your hands haven't touched a keyboard in months except to type "LGTM" on pull requests. Your technical skills are slowly fossilizing while you're stuck in meetings explaining to junior devs why their variable names should be more descriptive. The ultimate developer irony - get promoted for being good at coding, then never code again. It's like training your whole life to be a chef only to end up as the restaurant critic.

Trust me, when a dev says "I'll fix it in an hour," they've already forgotten about it 45 minutes ago. They're not procrastinating—they're stuck in a rabbit hole of Stack Overflow tabs trying to figure out why their perfectly logical solution is making things worse. The real timeline is always (estimated time × π + coffee breaks). It's like quantum mechanics—the bug exists in multiple states until you observe it, then it transforms into something completely different.