The Four Stages Of Debugging Grief

When Gandalf asks you to debug a regular expression, but you're just a hobbit who wanted second breakfast, not a regex nightmare. That cryptic pattern is basically the One Ring of programming—powerful, dangerous, and impossible to decipher without casting yourself into the fires of Stack Overflow. Even senior devs look at regex and think "It's some form of Elvish" before quietly opening their bookmarked regex101.com tab.

The brutal truth of modern tech interviews! At home, you're basically Thanos with the infinity gauntlet of tools—VSCode, GitHub Copilot, DeepSeek, and other AI assistants making you feel like you could snap half the bugs out of existence. But the moment you step into that interview room? Suddenly you're Rhino from Spider-Man—sweating in a ridiculous costume while trying to remember how to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard. The cognitive dissonance between our tool-augmented daily coding superpowers and the bare-metal interview process is the ultimate developer identity crisis.

The four horsemen of programming reality: what people think (hardware surgery), what parents think (rocket science), what you think (complex algorithms), and what you actually do (Googling "How to use dates in Javascript" for the 47th time this week). Nothing says "senior developer with 10 years experience" quite like having absolutely no idea how to handle dates without checking Stack Overflow first. It's not impostor syndrome if we're all impostors.

The moment of horrifying realization when you mock someone else's terrible code only to discover you wrote it six months ago. That slow transition from smug superiority to existential crisis hits differently when Git blame points back at your own username. Nothing quite like the taste of your own spaghetti code to humble you before lunchtime.

Content WHEN YOUR PM TELLS YOU TO JUST JUST DON'T WRITE BUGS IN YOUR CODE made with mematic

Look at this absolute psychopath writing a function that masquerades as addition but secretly performs dark magic with buffer overflows. The evil genius is using array indexing on a static buffer with arbitrary inputs, dereferencing pointers, and then subtracting the buffer's address from the result. This isn't addition—it's a ticking time bomb disguised as math. The dramatic lighting and quill pen really sell it. Nothing says "I'm about to crash your entire system" like writing memory-corrupting C code by candlelight like some kind of deranged 18th-century villain. Somewhere a security engineer just felt a cold shiver down their spine.