Never Happened To Anyone Right?

The eternal programmer's dilemma: spend 2 hours writing a script to automate a 15-minute task you'll never do again, or just... do the task? The math doesn't check out, but our brains sure think it does! That clenched fist represents the sheer willpower needed to resist opening a terminal and typing #!/bin/bash when you know deep down you should just get the task done manually. Fun fact: According to the "Automation Efficiency Threshold" (which I totally didn't make up), a task needs to be performed at least (development time ÷ manual time) times to be worth automating. But who follows that rule when you can write a cool script instead?

Nothing quite captures that first production deployment like a puppy discovering mirrors. One minute you're admiring your beautiful code that passed all the tests, and the next you're frantically checking logs at 2AM wondering how your elegant solution is somehow bringing down the entire system. That moment when you realize the safety net of code reviews was actually more like a suggestion, and now your name is forever attached to that incident report. Welcome to the club, kid. We've all been there—staring at our reflections, questioning our career choices.

Ah, the seven deadly archetypes of every engineering team. I've worked with all of these people, and I've been all these people—sometimes in the same sprint. My personal favorite is "The Silent Operator" who hasn't spoken since the company holiday party of 2019 but somehow commits the exact fix at 2 AM while everyone else is arguing in Slack. And don't get me started on "The System Rebuilder." Sure, event sourcing sounds amazing in theory—right up until you're explaining to the CEO why the shopping cart needs six months of refactoring. The real unicorn is someone who's none of these. If you find them, lock the door and hide their passport.

The sacred commandment of software development! Homer grabbing that "IF IT WORKS, DON'T TOUCH IT" advice slip with the desperation of someone who's broken production at least five times this sprint. The allure of "FREE PROGRAMMING ADVICE" quickly transforms into the cold, hard reality that refactoring working code is like performing heart surgery on a marathon runner mid-race. The true wisdom in our field isn't writing clever algorithms—it's knowing when to back away from the keyboard and let sleeping code lie.

Ah, the classic corporate tech hostage situation. You're hired as a developer, yet somehow expected to code with nothing but Notepad and prayers. The IT department—those mystical gatekeepers of admin privileges—stand between you and basic functionality like Docker, VS Code, and PostgreSQL. Meanwhile, you're sitting there like a carpenter who's been handed a banana instead of a hammer, screaming internally "I HAVE TO HAVE MY TOOLS!!!" while submitting your 17th ticket to install npm. Nothing quite captures the absurdity of modern software development like needing permission to do the job they're paying you for. Fun fact: The average developer spends approximately 84 years of their career waiting for IT to approve software installations. I might have made that up, but it certainly feels true.

The holy trinity of development methodologies: Test-driven developers write tests before code and silently judge everyone else. Meanwhile, error-driven developers are frantically explaining why production is on fire... again. It's the software development equivalent of "those who can't do, teach" except it's "those who can't test, debug in production." The raised hand isn't blessing code—it's trying to stop the chaos that's about to ensue.