How I Fix Stuff Working In IT

When the 22-year-old intern suggests we should "vibe code" instead of writing proper documentation and tests. Listen kid, I've been debugging spaghetti code since before you were born. I've seen codebases that would make you cry. There's no "vibing" in production—only tears, caffeine, and Stack Overflow. The only thing "vibrating" here is my patience as it rapidly approaches zero.

The elegant ascent of coding confidence versus the awkward stumble of performance anxiety. Nothing turns a seasoned developer into a bumbling intern faster than someone peering over your shoulder. Suddenly, basic syntax becomes quantum physics, variable names might as well be ancient hieroglyphics, and your fingers develop a mysterious allergy to the correct keys. The brain's instant response? "Quick, forget everything you've known for years!" It's like your code knowledge has a strict privacy policy that activates the moment witnesses arrive.

JavaScript's type coercion is like that friend who tries to help but makes everything worse. Look at this beautiful chaos: typeof NaN returns " number " because obviously not-a-number is totally a number! Loose equality says true==1 but strict equality says true===1 is false. Make up your mind! Floating point? 0.5+0.1==0.6 is true but 0.1+0.2==0.3 is false. IEEE 754 strikes again! Math.max() with no arguments gives -Infinity while Math.min() gives Infinity . Peak logic. The masterpiece: (1+[]+[]+![]) has length 9 because it converts to "1" + "" + "" + "false" = "1false" And my personal favorite: true+true+true===3 is actually true because JavaScript converts booleans to numbers for addition! No wonder the creator is smirking. He unleashed this beautiful monster on us and now we're all stuck with it. And we can't even escape because the entire web runs on it!

When your competitor's launcher is so broken it becomes your best marketing strategy! EA's launcher had one job - recognize purchased games - and somehow failed spectacularly at launch day. Meanwhile, Steam's platform just works™ and Gabe Newell (Steam's founder) collects his 30% cut from all those sweet, sweet refund-and-rebuy transactions. The irony is delicious - EA tried to avoid Steam's commission by pushing their own launcher, only to inadvertently send customers running back to Steam with credit cards in hand. Task failed successfully!

You know that moment when you're feeling kinda insecure about your coding skills, questioning your entire career path, maybe even googling "is it too late to become a barista"... and then you glance over at your classmate's screen and witness them comparing an integer variable to the LITERAL STRING "positive" in a for loop condition? Like bestie, that loop is NEVER going to execute because 'a' will NEVER equal the word "positive" 💀 And then declaring a variable called "double" (which is a reserved keyword in most languages) equals "balance"? The sheer audacity! The confidence! The complete disregard for syntax! Suddenly your imposter syndrome evaporates faster than your motivation on a Monday morning. Sometimes the best therapy is just... looking at someone else's code and realizing you're doing just fine, actually.

The initial joy of receiving user feedback quickly turns into existential pain when you realize they've sent an 18-minute screen recording of... absolutely nothing happening. Just a static screen. No audio. No cursor movement. No error messages. Nothing. It's like trying to diagnose a car problem when the customer sends you a photo of their garage door. Closed. From across the street. The real bug was the 18 minutes of your life that just disappeared forever.