The Greatest Fairy Tale In Software Engineering

Serial killers and psychopaths might be terrifying, but they've got nothing on the true monsters of our industry—developers who write flawless code in Notepad with zero internet help. You know that colleague who claims they "just whipped up" a thousand-line algorithm in plain text editor, offline, and it worked perfectly the first time? Yeah, back away slowly. That's not talent—that's a warning sign. After 15 years in this field, I've come to accept that anyone who can code without Stack Overflow probably also has a basement you don't want to see. Even my IDE's autocomplete feature is questioning your life choices right now.

The first block makes 1000 network calls to add numbers. The second just adds them locally. And yet some developers will still ask "why is my code so slow?" while their app makes HTTP requests to add 2+2. It's like driving to the grocery store to use their calculator when you have one on your phone. Sure, both methods get you the sum, but one involves putting on pants.

Content Do you even know how many bugs I put in my code last week? I don't care if there is a fly in yoh fryer uva. krishna.memes HB

Content When python throws an error in line 174 but your code only has 10 lines Son of a bitch. You're really no help at all, you know that?

That moment of horrified recognition when you excavate ancient code from your digital crypt. "Who wrote this abomination? Oh wait... it was me." The psychological journey from confidence to shame happens in milliseconds as you stare at variable names like 'temp1', 'finalFinalVersion', and comments promising to "fix this later." Your past self has left landmines of technical debt that your present self must now defuse while questioning every life decision that led to this moment.

That precarious bridge is held together by nothing but legacy code and prayers. You know deep in your soul that removing those 200 lines of commented-out spaghetti from 2012 will somehow cause the entire production system to implode, despite all logic suggesting otherwise. The best part? Six months later, you'll finally get the courage to delete it, only to discover that three critical functions were actually referencing a variable buried in there. Classic software engineering - where superstition is just another design pattern.