Be Very Afraid

That moment of existential dread when a coworker checks out your Git branch and sees the unholy abomination of code you've been working on. Suddenly all your variable names like final_final_v2_WORKS and those 47 commented-out debugging console.log() statements are on full display. Your commit messages reading "fix stuff" and "please work" aren't helping your case either. The digital equivalent of someone walking into your house while it's an absolute disaster.

The eternal cycle of developer self-sabotage in one perfect image. There you are, desperately trying to stay afloat while surrounded by the drowning corpses of abandoned projects with names like "cool-api-v2", "learn-rust-weekend", and "definitely-finishing-this-one". But wait! Is that a shiny new project idea with its innocent little face? Better drop everything and reach for it! Those other projects weren't drowning fast enough anyway. The GitHub graveyard grows by one repo every time someone thinks "I'll just start this real quick and get back to my other stuff later." Narrator: They never got back to their other stuff later.

Someone opened a GitHub issue titled "Love #822" with the message "I need a gf" only to have it promptly closed as "not planned" by a contributor who replied "Sorry to hear that." Romance: the one feature request that even the most comprehensive project roadmap doesn't include. Trust me, I've been maintaining codebases longer than some of you have been alive, and relationships are the one dependency that never resolves cleanly.

Ah, the unmistakable signature of a junior developer's code comments! That stop sign with the helpful clarification "THIS IS A STOP SIGN" perfectly captures the redundant commenting style that senior devs silently judge. It's like writing i++; // increments i by 1 or // The following function calculates the sum right above a function literally named calculateSum() . The code review gods weep silently as another obvious comment gets committed to the repo. Self-documenting code? Never heard of her.

You know a README was AI-generated when it looks like a unicorn threw up emojis all over your documentation. Every section has 🚀, every feature gets a ✨, and there's always that suspicious 📦 next to "Installation". But here's the thing—you can't actually prove it wasn't written by some overly enthusiastic developer who just discovered emoji shortcuts. Maybe they really are that excited about their npm package. Maybe they genuinely believe the rocket emoji adds 30% more performance. The plausible deniability is chef's kiss.

The Noah's Ark of code sources! At the top, we've got the majestic elephant (StackOverflow) carrying us through floods of bugs, the wise but dusty Documentation nobody reads, the giraffe (YouTube tutorials) stretching the truth but somehow working, GitHub code that's supposedly "production-ready," and the professor's theoretical perfection that falls apart in real life. Then there's your friend's code (which you secretly judge while copying), and your actual code (that embarrassing mess you hide from the world). But when the client shows up? Suddenly you're presenting that bizarre hybrid monstrosity—a chimera of StackOverflow answers, YouTube hacks, and panic-induced workarounds that somehow functions. And the client stares at your Frankenstein creation thinking "what the hell is this?" The true engineering skill isn't writing perfect code—it's making your abomination look intentional during the demo.