Stephen Toub You Tempter

Look at this beautiful encapsulation—a private joke that can only be accessed through a setter method. And just like real programmer humor, if you need it explained, "you wouldn't get it." The irony is perfect: a class called Meme with a private Joke that needs to be set explicitly, much like how the best programming jokes require insider knowledge that can't be easily transferred. The Joker knows what's up—some jokes just don't compile in everyone's mental runtime.

The universal rite of passage for coding newbies: discovering a semicolon error and treating it like they've found the Higgs boson of programming problems. Veterans watching this unfold are just sitting there thinking, "Ah yes, I remember when I too believed semicolons were worthy of philosophical debate instead of letting my IDE handle it while I focus on actual problems... like why my perfectly functional code works in dev but crashes in production." Nothing screams "I just installed VS Code yesterday" quite like passionately sharing that semicolon meme your non-technical friend would find hilarious.

The eternal dilemma of function design perfectly illustrated on an IQ bell curve. The low-IQ crowd (0.1%) and high-IQ geniuses (0.1%) agree: "Just add a new function." Meanwhile, the average devs (34%) in the middle are sweating bullets, desperately clinging to their sacred principle of code reuse: "NO WE SHOULD ADD ANOTHER PARAMETER AND REUSE CODE!" It's the horseshoe theory of programming - both extremes of the intelligence spectrum somehow reach the same conclusion while the "well-actually" crowd in the middle is busy creating those monstrous functions with 17 optional parameters, 9 of which are booleans. And they wonder why nobody wants to maintain their code...

Five identical orange cats labeled as different programming languages surrounding a loaf of bread labeled "HTML". Because let's face it, HTML isn't a real programming language - it's just bread. Delicious, structurally important bread that holds everything together, but still... just bread. Meanwhile, all the "real" programming languages are basically the same cat in different moods. Sure, they'll hiss and scratch at each other about which one is superior, but deep down they're all just orange cats doing cat things with slightly different attitudes.

Oh no. Your manager just discovered the Gang of Four book and now thinks they're an architect. What was once a simple 50-line feature is now being meticulously refactored into seventeen different classes, each with its own AbstractFactoryBuilderStrategyObserverDecoratorProxy. Every function call now requires navigating through six layers of indirection because "it's more maintainable this way." The codebase has transformed from a cozy cottage into a sprawling industrial complex where finding anything requires a map, a compass, and possibly divine intervention. Sure, it's "enterprise-ready" now, but you need a PhD just to add a button. The real kicker? Half these patterns are solving problems you don't even have yet. Welcome to over-engineering paradise, population: your entire dev team, all working overtime to understand what used to be obvious.

Someone asked for the worst tech advice and honestly, this is peak developer wisdom right here. Just wrap everything in a try-catch block and throw it into the void. Error handling? Never heard of her. Stack traces? Who needs 'em when you can just silently fail and pretend nothing happened. This is basically the programming equivalent of sweeping dirt under the rug and calling it cleaning. Your app crashes? Try-catch. Database connection fails? Try-catch. Existential crisis at 2 AM? Believe it or not, also try-catch. The catch block stays empty though—because acknowledging problems is for people who have time for proper error handling. Production bugs will love you for this approach. Future you will definitely not be cursing past you while debugging why the application just... stops working with zero logs or error messages. Ship it!