Dev Survival Rule No 1

Nothing strikes fear into a developer's heart quite like asking colleagues to review code. The bear in this meme represents that senior dev who's been "too busy" to look at your PR for two weeks straight. The title "LGTM" (Looks Good To Me) is the holy grail response we all want but rarely get without 47 nitpicky comments about your variable naming conventions. The survival strategy works both in forests and open office plans - just ask someone who wants to avoid you to do something for you, and watch them magically disappear faster than documentation during a deadline crunch.

Ah, the classic "// TODO: remove when no longer needed" followed by a roof built around a ladder instead of removing it. This is peak developer energy! Just like that temporary fix from 2016 that's now somehow a critical part of your production infrastructure. The comment might as well say "// TODO: remove when hell freezes over" because we all know that ladder is staying there until the building collapses. Technical debt with physical manifestation!

When your cloud budget runs dry but your boss still wants that serverless architecture... Behold! The pinnacle of innovation: "AWS Cloud" written with a Sharpie on a CD. The "offline version" is just *chef's kiss*. Remember when we thought the cloud was just someone else's computer? Turns out it can also be your own dusty CD-ROM from 2003. Next up: "Kubernetes Cluster" written on a stack of floppy disks. Por fin indeed! 🙏

In the Unix world, asking "what's the magic word" isn't about saying "please" – it's about typing "sudo" before your command. For the uninitiated, sudo (superuser do) temporarily grants you god-like powers over your system. Regular users are peasants until they utter this incantation. It's basically the difference between "I'd like to delete this critical system file" and "I WILL delete this critical system file, and you'll thank me for it."

The five stages of grief, but for CI/CD pipelines. Started with "ci bruh" (the only commit that actually passed), then descended into pure existential dread with commits like "i hate CI", "I cant belive it", and my personal favorite, "CI u in h..." which got cut off but we all know where that was going. Fourteen commits. All on the same day. All failing except the first one. The developer went through denial ("bro i got to fix CI"), anger ("i hate CI"), bargaining ("Try CI again"), and eventually just... gave up on creative commit messages entirely. "CI", "CI again", "CI U again"—truly the work of someone whose soul has left their body. The best part? "Finally Fix CI" at commit 14 still failed. Because of course it did. That's not optimism, that's Stockholm syndrome. When your commit messages turn into a cry for help and your CI pipeline is still red, maybe it's time to just push to production and let chaos decide.

While you're busy debating the merits of Trello's simplicity versus Jira's feature bloat, I'm over here managing projects with a combination of sticky notes, existential dread, and a text file that hasn't been backed up since 2019. Project management tools are just digital bureaucracy with prettier UI. The real pros know that chaos is the only true methodology—it's agile without the ceremonies and scrum without the meetings. We're not fighting over which flavor of micromanagement we prefer; we're rejecting the premise entirely.