Me, debugging

Content Me beginning a new project: I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father Me 40 hours in fixing bugs: I want to be free of this pain.

Content I got error line 235 But my code has only 20 lines WHATERER, WORKS. C'mon I'll help you A CHAMP TEEPAGORN

The cobbler's children have no shoes, and the programmer's house has no smart tech—just a demonic printer that might need to be put down at any moment. Nothing captures the duality of tech life better than this. Non-tech people building smart homes with IoT everything, while actual developers know better than to invite that chaos into their lives. We're too busy fixing bugs at work to come home and debug why our refrigerator is suddenly speaking Portuguese and ordering 50 gallons of milk. And that printer? The universal enemy. The one piece of technology that has somehow escaped decades of innovation and remains stubbornly, maliciously stupid. It senses fear and feeds on desperation. It requires blood sacrifice to print a simple PDF.

Nothing says "I'm from a different era of computing" like sending a PDF of a printout instead of a Git repo link. That senior dev probably still has a drawer full of floppy disks "just in case." Next they'll tell you to compile it by feeding the paper into your CD drive and typing "make oldschool." The digital equivalent of getting directions via fax machine when you asked for GPS coordinates.

The four states of programming, as illustrated by a slightly deformed cat figurine. Top left: Your code works and you understand why—the perfect cat, upright and alert. Top right: When it doesn't work, the cat is tipped over, just like your hopes and dreams. Bottom left: The dreaded "works but you don't know why" scenario—a cat that's somehow functional despite being a bizarre side view of nostrils. And finally, bottom right: the "doesn't work and you have no clue why" state—yet somehow this cat looks the most normal of all. The true essence of debugging: the more confused you are, the more professional you appear.

The C++ Committee hands out medals for printing "Hello, World!" while every other language stands on the podium looking dignified. Meanwhile, C++ guy is busy screaming, flipping everyone off, and spraying champagne like he just discovered fire. Nothing captures the spirit of modern programming quite like watching C++ celebrate basic functionality that other languages implemented without needing therapy afterward. The committee's slogan might as well be "We'll make string handling intuitive by 2053, we promise!" The real joke is all of us still writing C++ in 2023 while explaining to management that memory leaks are just "giving back to the operating system."