Be Wary Of Gary's Modern C# Wizardry

Ah yes, the classic startup "opportunity" where you can trade actual money for the possibility of future money! The red flag is so big it could guide ships through fog. Translation: "We can't afford developers but we're pretty sure our idea is the next Facebook. Trust us, bro." Zero applicants after three weeks? Shocking! Almost as if professional developers enjoy paying rent and buying food. The audacity of calling unpaid work a "stake in our future" instead of what it really is—gambling with your time.

The IDE is like that annoying friend who's technically right but completely missing the point. "Possible null reference return" — yeah, no kidding, that's literally what I just typed. The method is return null; and the IDE is still like "Hey buddy, I think you might be returning null here!" Thanks for the groundbreaking analysis, Captain Obvious. Next you'll tell me water is wet and meetings could've been emails.

OH. MY. GOD. The AUDACITY of these students using a 32-bit integer for EVERYTHING! 💀 Meanwhile, that poor 8-bit char and 16-bit short are just STANDING THERE, completely IGNORED and UNEMPLOYED! The DRAMA! The WASTE of precious memory! It's like buying a mansion just to store your socks! Those memory-efficient data types are literally BEGGING to be used, but nooooo, let's just throw 32 bits at EVERYTHING because who needs optimization when you have 16GB of RAM, right?! The 1970s programmers are ROLLING in their retirement homes right now!

The semicolon - that tiny punctuation mark that turns a broken compiler into a working program. First-year CS students are blissfully unaware that their code won't run because they forgot a semicolon, while simultaneously not understanding why adding one magically fixes everything. The best part? They'll spend 3 hours debugging only to find they're missing a single character that experienced devs spot in 0.2 seconds. Welcome to programming, kids - where your entire project can fail because you didn't end a line with a winky eye!

Ah, the classic "#DEFINE MADNESS" - doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Twenty years in this industry and I still catch myself hammering that compile button like it's going to magically fix itself. Meanwhile, the compiler is just sitting there thinking, "This idiot is sending me the exact same broken code repeatedly. Should we tell him or just keep launching errors like a medieval catapult?" The real kicker? That one time you compile the same code without changing anything and it suddenly works. That's when you know the universe is just messing with you.

The three stages of variable naming in every developer's career: Top: camelCase - One hump for each word. Simple, elegant, industry standard. Middle: PascalCase - Like camelCase but with an ego. Every word gets to start with a capital letter. Bottom: snake_case - For when you're slithering through code at 3am and can't be bothered to reach for the shift key. And somewhere, not pictured: kebab-case - The naming convention that didn't make it into the suitcase.