Backend Memes

You can write the most elegant, artisanal, hand-crafted code with perfect variable names and comments that read like poetry. You can spend hours refactoring, optimizing, and making everything *just right*. But when the garbage collector shows up, it doesn't care about your feelings or your code aesthetics. It sees memory that needs freeing, and it's taking out the trash—whether that's your beautifully architected object or some janky temp variable you forgot about. Democracy in action: all unused memory is equal in the eyes of the GC.

While everyone's fighting over whether React is better than Vue or if TypeScript is worth the hassle, COBOL developers are just sitting there eating their lunch, completely unbothered, making six figures maintaining banking systems from 1972. The language is older than most developers' parents, yet it still runs 95% of ATM transactions and 80% of in-person transactions. Banks literally can't find enough COBOL programmers, so they're paying obscene amounts to anyone who knows it. Meanwhile, the rest of us are rewriting our apps in the framework-of-the-month for the third time this year. Job security? More like job immortality. Those mainframes aren't going anywhere.

You know that side project you started with pure intentions and a clean architecture? Yeah, that one. You told yourself it'd take 2 days max—just a simple MVP to validate the idea. Fast forward one month and your codebase looks like someone tried to untangle headphones in a tornado. Each "small feature" brought three dependencies, two refactors, and one existential crisis about whether you should've just used a monorepo. The real tragedy? You're still not done. There's always just one more feature before you can ship. Authentication can wait, but dark mode? Absolutely critical. The cycle continues until your "weekend project" becomes a legacy system you're too emotionally invested to abandon. Pro tip: That tangled mess of cables is actually a more organized system than your project's dependency graph at this point.

Imagine thinking you understand networking because you configured your home router once. Then you meet a sysadmin who's been wrestling with subnet masks since the dial-up era, and suddenly you realize you know NOTHING. They didn't just learn about 255.255.255.0 – they were MOLDED by it, shaped by its binary darkness, calculating network addresses in their sleep while you were still Googling "what is DHCP." By the time you discovered CIDR notation, they were already a master, and subnetting was nothing to them but BLINDING clarity! The dramatic irony here is *chef's kiss* – Bane's mask becomes the subnet mask, the thing that defines their very identity as a network warrior. You merely adopted the subnet; they were BORN in it.

Database normalization? Foreign keys? Proper schema design? Never heard of her. When it's time to migrate that legacy database that's been held together with duct tape and prayers, you'll find yourself begging the data to just... be normal . But nope, Excel decides to show up to the party uninvited, screaming its head off with its CSV exports, date formatting nightmares, and those delightful cells that randomly convert everything to scientific notation. The real horror? When stakeholders hand you a 47-tab Excel workbook with merged cells, inconsistent data types, and formulas that reference other workbooks on someone's laptop from 2014. "Just import this into the new system," they say. Sure, right after I finish my therapy sessions.

A formatting bug caused a film review to display 1 star instead of the intended 0 stars. The correction was published on February 2, 2026—a date that hasn't happened yet. Someone pushed a datetime bug to production and nobody noticed until The Guardian had to explain why they're correcting reviews from the future. The Jira ticket for this probably has 47 comments, 3 sprint reassignments, and ends with "works on my machine." The real tragedy? The reviewer wanted to give it zero stars but the system said "nah, minimum is 1." Classic off-by-one error meets timezone chaos meets someone hardcoding dates. Beautiful disaster.

Captain Picard walking back into the office on Monday morning, immediately requesting a damage report from his computer. Because naturally, something broke over the weekend while you weren't looking. Maybe it was that deploy on Friday afternoon. Maybe Jenkins decided to have an existential crisis. Maybe production just spontaneously combusted because the universe hates you. Either way, Monday morning means surveying the wreckage and figuring out which fire to put out first. The weekend was nice while it lasted.

While everyone's out here having a full-blown brawl over React vs Vue, microservices vs monoliths, and whether tabs or spaces will end civilization, there's some guy peacefully eating his lunch while maintaining a COBOL system that's been running since before the internet had opinions. The real kicker? That COBOL dev is probably making bank because there are like 12 people left on Earth who know how to maintain those ancient mainframes that still process 95% of ATM transactions and credit card swaps. Banks literally can't afford to let these systems die, so they're stuck paying premium rates for developers who learned programming when punch cards were still a thing. Meanwhile, the "modern stack" crowd is too busy fighting about which JavaScript framework will be obsolete next Tuesday to notice they're reinventing the wheel for the 47th time this year. Job security? That COBOL dev has it in spades while the rest of us are one npm audit away from an existential crisis.

The evolution of text editors told through the lens of broken friendships. We've all been there—you started coding with Notepad++ like it was your ride-or-die, then Sublime Text came along with its sleek UI and multi-cursor magic, and suddenly you're acting like Notepad++ never existed. Now Sublime Text is getting the same treatment because VS Code (represented by that orange Sublime logo) showed up with IntelliSense, integrated terminal, extensions for literally everything, and—oh yeah—it's free. No more "unregistered" popup guilt trips. The crossed-out Notepad++ at the bottom really drives home the point: it's not just replaced, it's erased from memory . The text editor graveyard is real, and we're all guilty of moving on without looking back. RIP to the tools that taught us to code before we got fancy with our IDEs.

The AI/ML revolution has created a new aristocracy in tech, and spoiler alert: traditional developers aren't invited to the palace. While ML Engineers, Data Scientists, and MLOps Engineers strut around like they're founding fathers of the digital age, the rest of us are down in the trenches just trying to get Docker to work on a Tuesday. Web Developers are fighting CSS battles and JavaScript framework fatigue. Software Developers are debugging legacy code written by someone who left the company in 2014. And DevOps Developers? They're just trying to explain to management why the CI/CD pipeline broke again after someone pushed directly to main. Meanwhile, the AI crowd gets to say "we trained a model" and suddenly they're tech royalty with VC funding and conference keynotes. The salary gap speaks for itself—one group is discussing their stock options over artisanal coffee, while the other is Googling "why is my build failing" for the 47th time today.

Oh the AUDACITY! You want your functions to be clean, readable, and self-documenting with proper parameter names? Well TOUGH LUCK because the dates package decided to go full minimalist mode and name everything like they're texting on a flip phone from 2003. But the MOMENT you try to feed it some actual shorthand notation, it throws a tantrum like "sorry sweetie, you're not my type" 💅 The absolute DRAMA of trying to validate dates with strict parameters while simultaneously dealing with cryptic abbreviated format strings. It's giving "I want my cake and eat it too" energy, except the cake is type safety and the eating is... well, also type safety. Choose your poison: either write "my_stinky_params" that look like a toddler named them, OR embrace the chaos of shorthand that the library won't even recognize. There is no middle ground, only suffering.

Oh honey, the AUDACITY. The sheer BLASPHEMY of suggesting JavaScript is the best language for backend development just sent this kid straight to the orphanage. Like, sure, Node.js exists and all, but calling it the *best*? That's not just wrong, that's a war crime in the developer community. The Terminator here said "nope, not my child" and yeeted that relationship into the void faster than you can say "callback hell." Nothing says "I'm disowning you" quite like your mom being a backend dev and hearing you praise JS for server-side work. Python, Java, Go, C#, Rust—they're all sobbing in the corner while this kid just torpedoed their entire family tree with one cursed opinion. RIP to those foster parents, they never stood a chance.