Unfinished Side Projects

Ah, the sacred text of professional groveling. This is the comprehensive collection of phrases every developer keeps in a text file for when they realize they've been arguing about a bug for 45 minutes only to discover they forgot a semicolon. These aren't just apologies—they're survival tools. Copy-paste these into Slack after your senior dev points out you've been using the wrong API endpoint for three weeks and watch as your performance review magically improves from "concerning" to "shows potential." The best part? After 10 years in the industry, you'll develop the ability to sound genuinely contrite while simultaneously rolling your eyes so hard you can see your own brain.

When your colleague asks about your Pull Request and you casually mention you were "vibe coding" while the stats show +93 lines added, -38,918 lines deleted. That's not coding to a vibe—that's coding during an existential crisis. Nothing says "I'm totally fine" like obliterating 38K lines of code on a Tuesday afternoon. Management will definitely not notice this minor refactoring.

The code review terror is real. That moment when your PR meets the unforgiving gaze of a senior dev who's seen it all—including every mistake you're about to make. You're just huddled in the corner, clutching your keyboard, wondering if your variable naming conventions are about to trigger another 45-minute lecture on "the right way to code." Meanwhile, the senior dev looms like a terrifying mechanical overlord, ready to dismantle your self-esteem function by function. Six months of experience vs six years of accumulated cynicism isn't even a fair fight.

Junior dev commits what looks like a security audit's worst nightmare directly to staging. We've got hardcoded API keys with "sk-proj" prefixes (looking at you, OpenAI), admin passwords literally set to "admin123", MongoDB connection strings with credentials in plain text, AWS secrets just vibing in variables, and a Stripe key that's probably already been scraped by seventeen bots. But wait, there's more! They're storing passwords in localStorage (chef's kiss for XSS attacks), setting global window credentials, fetching from a URL literally called "malicious-site.com", and my personal favorite - trying to parse "not valid json {{(" because why not test your error handling in production? The loop creating 10,000 arrays of 1,000 elements each is just the performance cherry on top of this security disaster sundae. Someone's about to learn why we have .env files, code reviews, and why the senior dev is now stress-eating in the corner.

Ah, the perfect GitHub alibi! Luigi's contribution graph shows 0 contributions in 2024 but somehow managed 847 contributions on December 4th last year. That's not suspicious at all! Nothing says "I definitely wasn't committing a felony that day" like committing code 847 times in 24 hours. The classic programmer's defense: "Your Honor, I couldn't have done it—look at my GitHub activity! I was clearly too busy making meaningless commits to have time for murder."

So someone's offering you $5 million to get yourself fired in 48 hours, but plot twist: you can't quit and you can't do anything obviously terrible enough to get the boot. What's a desperate developer to do? Easy. Just casually drop a git push origin master straight to production without a care in the world. No pull requests, no code reviews, no testing, no mercy. Just pure, unfiltered chaos pushed directly to the main branch like some kind of digital arsonist. Watch as the entire infrastructure crumbles, the CI/CD pipeline screams in terror, and your DevOps team collectively has a meltdown. You'll be escorted out by security before you can say "but it worked on my machine!" Honestly, this is the nuclear option of career sabotage, and it's absolutely diabolical.