Just Hard Reset It

Content Coding Chair anda seal Debugging Chair

Content SENIOR DEV INTERN How did you fix that Bug? setTimeout ( )

Content CATALIN PIT catalinmpit Let me break it for you. Coding is: - 1 actually coding -40 debugging - 15 coffee breaks - 30 googling errors - 9 staring with your colleagues at the screen - 5 trying copypasted solutions from Stack Overflow

Ah, the sacred tomes of legacy code! A stack of books with the spine message "THESE BOOKS ARE HERE FOR AN ESSENTIAL STRUCTURAL PURPOSE. THEY ARE NOT FOR SALE." is basically the perfect metaphor for that 15-year-old codebase nobody understands but everyone's terrified to touch. Just like these books holding up some mysterious shelf, that spaghetti code written by a developer who left in 2008 is somehow keeping your entire production system from collapsing. Touch it? Refactor it? Don't be ridiculous! It's not meant to be understood—it's meant to be structural . The irony is delicious. We spend years learning clean code principles only to worship at the altar of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" when faced with the ancient scripts. The documentation? Oh, that left with Dave from Engineering years ago.

Sleeping peacefully until your brain jolts you awake at 3:27 AM because you realized you used = instead of == in that authentication code. That single equals sign just gave admin access to literally everyone. Sweet dreams! Nothing quite like the cold sweat of realizing you've accidentally created the world's most generous authorization system. The fix takes 2 seconds but the existential dread lasts forever.

The perfect excuse for slacking off has evolved over the decades. First it was "my code is compiling" (the classic), then "my AI is training" (the upgrade), followed by "my LLM is thinking" (the premium model), and now we've come full circle back to "my code is compiling" because why fix what isn't broken? The longer the wait time, the longer you can sip coffee and stare blankly at your screen while your manager slowly loses their will to question you. Nature's perfect defense mechanism for developers in the wild.