First Time?

Ah yes, the classic "my tests pass in isolation" syndrome. The soldier in camo is proudly directing deadly weapons away from the sleeping person, congratulating himself on his amazing unit tests. Meanwhile, production code is getting absolutely shredded by edge cases that the tests never bothered to check for. Sure, your function works great when you pass it exactly what you expect... shame users don't read your mind and follow your undocumented assumptions.

The bell curve of programmer confidence strikes again! On the far left and right, we have the 0.1% geniuses who genuinely know how to improve performance. But that sweaty, panicked 34% in the middle? That's the rest of us, desperately chanting "IF IT'S WORKING, DON'T TOUCH IT" like it's a sacred mantra. Nothing captures the development lifecycle quite like the transition from "I can optimize this garbage" to "Dear god, it compiled, NOBODY MOVE" to "Watch me refactor this entire codebase." The middle is where the true wisdom lies – sometimes the bravest engineering decision is no decision at all.

Content Thread Computer programming Kat Maddox ctrishifti me: why isn't this working? normal languages: you screwed up over here me: oh thanks me: why isn't this working? javascript: me: please i'm begging you javascript: C 9:40 AM Aug 18, 2020 Twitter Web App 350 Retweets and comments 2.1K Likes

The code review terror is real. That moment when your PR meets the unforgiving gaze of a senior dev who's seen it all—including every mistake you're about to make. You're just huddled in the corner, clutching your keyboard, wondering if your variable naming conventions are about to trigger another 45-minute lecture on "the right way to code." Meanwhile, the senior dev looms like a terrifying mechanical overlord, ready to dismantle your self-esteem function by function. Six months of experience vs six years of accumulated cynicism isn't even a fair fight.

The modern developer's descent into madness: First, we try ChatGPT because who has time to actually solve problems? When that fails, we panic and throw Perplexity at it because clearly we need a different AI. Still stuck? Obviously our prompt game is weak! Let's use Claude to generate a better prompt for ChatGPT. And the final evolutionary stage: using ChatGPT to generate a Perplexity prompt that generates a ChatGPT prompt. Meanwhile, the documentation sits there, unread, silently judging our AI-prompt-inception circus. The clown makeup is just our career progression visualized.

The evolution of a developer's paranoia in three stages: Peasant tier: Using the mouse to highlight, right-click, and select copy/paste like some kind of digital caveman. Intermediate tier: Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keyboard shortcuts. Efficient. Respectable. Enlightened tier: Ctrl+C pressed five times followed by Ctrl+V because the clipboard has betrayed you too many times before. Trust nothing. Verify everything. The real senior developers don't even trust their own keyboard inputs anymore. Not after... the incident .