One Of Us

When your colleague gets to use the fancy for loop with a clear exit condition, but you're stuck with the while loop that never seems to end - just like this press conference. The guy on the left is basically all of us waiting for that condition to finally evaluate to false so we can go home. Meanwhile, management keeps adding microphones like they're adding requirements to the sprint.

Kid: "My daddy can fix this hedgehog!" Other kid: "Is your daddy a vet?" Kid: "No, he fixes BUGS! He has books about animals and hedgehogs!" The books in dad's room: *literally every programming textbook ever written about algorithms, machine learning, and data structures* Somewhere, a programmer dad is having an existential crisis because his child thinks he's qualified to perform veterinary surgery based on his debugging skills. Sorry sweetie, Daddy's "bugs" don't have legs, fur, or a pulse. Though honestly, after dealing with legacy code for 10 years, fixing an actual hedgehog might be easier than untangling THAT mess.

The evolution of a programmer's Saturday night after a few beers is painfully accurate. Start the evening feeling ambitious, cracking open that book on complex concurrency algorithms thinking "tonight's the night I finally master this!" Two beers later, reality sets in. "Maybe I'll just read about the simple concurrency stuff instead." By beer four, all pretense of sophistication is gone. Just point to the mutex and grunt "lock thing make code no breaky." And that's how senior developers are born. Not through education, but through the gradual acceptance that sometimes the simplest solution is just to prevent everyone from touching your stuff at the same time.

HOW DARE YOU QUESTION THE SACRED TRADITION OF i,j VARIABLES?! The AUDACITY! Since the dawn of coding time, we've used i and j for loop counters like it was handed down from the programming gods themselves. Try using 'x' or 'counter' in your loops and watch as senior devs spontaneously combust at their desks. It's not just convention—it's PROGRAMMING LAW, and we will defend it with the same intensity as tabs vs. spaces or where to put curly braces. Don't even THINK about using meaningful variable names in your loops—that's heresy of the highest order!

Ah, using regex to find prime numbers—the computational equivalent of performing brain surgery with a chainsaw. That expression isn't finding primes; it's summoning demons from the seventh circle of debugging hell. The look of pure madness on his face says it all: "I've stared into the regex abyss, and it winked back at me." Next time, just use the Sieve of Eratosthenes like a normal person instead of writing cryptic symbols that would make even Cthulhu say "that's a bit much."

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.