You Just Got Vectored!!!

The kid's tears are fully justified. Nothing says "welcome to the thunderdome" quite like your first segmentation fault at 2 AM. Memory management in C++ is basically signing up for a lifetime of therapy sessions where you constantly question if you're the problem. "Did I delete that pointer? Wait, did I delete it TWICE?" The look of pure sympathy from the adult is the same look senior devs give you right before saying "Yeah, that's why we switched to Rust."

Someone actually filed a GitHub issue because their cough crashed their program. Let that sink in. Their biological function literally corrupted memory somewhere and brought down code. This is what happens when you code so close to the metal that even your bodily functions can trigger buffer overflows. The real question is - did they try turning their throat off and on again before submitting the ticket?

When your coding interview asks you to implement FizzBuzz but you've spent the last decade writing unreadable code to impress your colleagues. That's not just FizzBuzz—that's FizzBuzz with extra steps, obfuscation, and a sprinkle of "I'm too smart for readable solutions." Nothing says "hire me" like turning a 5-line problem into cryptic sorcery using the __LINE__ macro to loop through numbers. The interviewer wanted to see if you could code; you showed them you could create puzzles that would make the Sphinx quit its day job.

Ah yes, the classic "just code it in Assembly" solution! Because nothing says "I'm desperate for performance" like abandoning all modern conveniences and diving straight into the metal. FPS dropping in your RollerCoaster Tycoon clone? Forget optimizing your existing code! Just rewrite the entire thing in Assembly with zero libraries, no engine, no team support—just you and 500,000 lines of raw machine instructions. Who needs sleep or sanity when you can manually manage every register and memory address? The irony is that some legendary games like RollerCoaster Tycoon were actually written mostly in Assembly by programming wizards. But those people weren't normal humans—they were coding deities who probably dreamed in opcodes.

Ah, the classic "let me fix this with multithreading" trap. Nothing says "I'm about to ruin my own day" quite like thinking threads will simplify your code. For the uninitiated: threading is like inviting 10 chefs to cook in your tiny kitchen simultaneously. Sure, in theory, dinner gets made faster. In practice, they're all fighting over the same knife, someone's pasta water is boiling over, and nobody remembers who put what in the oven. The punchline isn't even complete, and that's the genius part. We all know it ends with "...and now the problems are racing each other." Race conditions: the gift that keeps on giving errors that can't be reproduced in the debugger.

Remember when coding meant wrestling with assembly and reading manuals thicker than your college textbook? Those 70s programmers didn't have Stack Overflow to cry on—they had biceps from carrying documentation and nightmares about memory allocation. Fast forward to modern times where we're practically coddled by interpreters that say "Aww, you forgot a semicolon? No worries, I'll pretend I didn't see that." The hardest thing we do now is decide which framework to abandon next month. Every time I have to touch low-level code, I silently thank the buff psychopaths who came before us. They weren't programmers—they were digital blacksmiths forging code with their bare hands.