The Perfect Sorting Algorithm

That moment when you realize you've been in this industry so long that basic concepts have become ancient artifacts. The look of existential dread when a freshman asks what a zip file is... like watching someone question why we still use wheels on cars. Nothing makes you feel more like a digital dinosaur than explaining compression algorithms to kids who grew up with unlimited cloud storage. And here I am, remembering when we passed code around on actual floppy disks.

When your friend discovers you're hardcoding an entire chess game by manually printing each board state for every possible move. 2.6 million lines of code instead of using a chess library or even basic loops? That's not programming, that's digital masochism. The real checkmate here isn't on the board—it's the developer's sanity. Somewhere, a computer science professor just felt a disturbance in the force and doesn't know why.

Oh the sweet victory of finishing Advent of Code Day 25... in February! 🎉 When you're staring at ASCII art code challenges for so long that your dreams have syntax highlighting! The formal announcement of completion paired with that "yes I know I'm two months late" disclaimer is peak programmer energy. Finishing AOC challenges is like running a marathon where everyone else crossed the finish line weeks ago, but you're still celebrating with your arms up because HEY YOU ACTUALLY FINISHED IT!

When someone asks for a random seed value, there's only one correct answer in the universe: 42. No need to think, no need to generate a proper random number—just channel your inner Douglas Adams and drop that Hitchhiker's Guide reference. It's the perfect programmer inside joke that separates the seniors from the interns. The best part? It works every single time, and nobody questions it because it's literally the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Why waste CPU cycles on true randomness when perfection already exists?

Reading "Multithreading for Dummies" doesn't make you an expert. The guy thinks he's ready to impress his date's father with parallel programming knowledge, but dad's already starting the countdown thread in the background. Classic case of a junior dev who skimmed the documentation and now thinks they can handle race conditions. Meanwhile, the father process is about to terminate this conversation with extreme prejudice.

The existential crisis every new game developer faces when they realize their entire career is just figuring out how to make different shapes not pass through each other. After years of education and dreams of creating the next Elden Ring, it all boils down to "wait, is that box touching that other box?" and "why is this character's arm suddenly disappearing into the wall?" The veterans with the gun have always known the truth - collision detection is the real final boss that never goes away.