A Realization I Had Today

Content IF DEBUGGING IS THE PROCESS OF REMOVING SOFTWARE BUGS, THEN PROGRAMMING MUST BE THE PROCESS OF PUTTING THEM IN.. - EDSGER DIJKSTRA TechWorm

Content Internet hole AB FL Posted in rengrish by uSnxgnt reddit

The eternal developer dilemma: crawling 21 miles through the desert to automate a task that would take 10 minutes to do manually. Why solve something in 10 minutes when you can spend your entire workday building an over-engineered solution? The automation paradox is real—we'll happily burn 10 hours "saving time" while completely ignoring the simple path right in front of us. The ROI math never checks out, but hey, at least we got to write code instead of doing actual work!

Remember that first time your "Hello World!" program actually ran? That rush of dopamine was better than any drug. One line of code that took you five hours to set up because you spent three hours fighting with the Python installer, another hour figuring out what a PATH variable is, and one more hour wondering why your terminal kept saying "python is not recognized as an internal or external command." But when those magical words finally appeared on screen? Pure ecstasy. The beginning of a lifelong addiction to solving problems that wouldn't exist if you hadn't tried to solve the previous problem.

The ancient art of debugging with print statements. When your code breaks at 2 AM and you're too tired to figure out proper breakpoints, you just litter your codebase with console.log("HERE") , print("WHY GOD WHY") , or System.out.println("KILL ME") . It's like leaving breadcrumbs through the forest of your broken logic. Sure, proper debugging tools exist, but nothing beats the raw, primal satisfaction of watching your terminal fill with desperate messages as you narrow down exactly where everything went to hell.

Therapy for programmers looks different. The code snippet shows the classic "if not condition, do whatever" pattern - the digital equivalent of shrugging and walking away from a problem. That smug look? It's the face of someone who's written untraceable bugs into production and feels absolutely zero remorse about it. The real mental health crisis in tech isn't burnout, it's the emotional void where code accountability should be.