Javascript Memes

The virgin API consumer is basically every developer's nightmare journey: drowning in OAuth flows, rate limits hitting like a 429 status code to the face, and having to verify everything short of their grandmother's maiden name just to GET some JSON. Meanwhile, they're shackled by tokens, quotas, and the constant fear that the API provider will yank their endpoint away like a rug. Then there's the chad third-party scraper who just... doesn't care. No OAuth? No problem. Rate limits? What rate limits? They're out here parsing HTML with regex (the forbidden technique that makes computer scientists weep), paying captcha farms pennies, and scraping so fast backends are having existential crises. They've got Selenium, curl, and the audacity of someone who's never read a Terms of Service. The best part? "Website thinks his user agent is a phone" and "doesn't care about changes in policies." While legitimate developers are stuck in OAuth hell, scrapers are just spoofing headers and living their best life. The title references Zombocom, that legendary early 2000s website where "you can do anything" – which is exactly how scrapers operate in the lawless wild west of web scraping. Fun fact: Companies spend millions building anti-scraping infrastructure, yet a determined developer with curl and a rotating proxy can still extract their entire database before lunch.

Discord literally had to implement a self-destruct feature because it was eating so much RAM that it became a liability. When your app is such a memory hog that you need to add a "restart before I crash the entire system" failsafe, maybe—just maybe—wrapping a website in Chromium wasn't the best architectural decision. The fact that 4GB is the threshold tells you everything. That's more RAM than entire operating systems used to need. But hey, at least Discord is self-aware enough to restart itself. Most Electron apps just sit there, bloated and unrepentant, slowly consuming your system resources like a digital black hole until you manually kill them. Fun fact: Each Electron app bundles its own copy of Chromium. So if you're running Discord, Slack, VS Code, and Spotify simultaneously, congratulations—you're running four separate browsers just to use what could've been native apps or actual websites.

Oh, so we're just casually letting ChatGPT debug our code now? Just gonna throw our errors at the AI overlords and pray they send back working code? The sheer AUDACITY of this approach is both horrifying and... honestly kinda genius? Like, why spend hours understanding your own code when you can just ask ChatGPT "Fix for: [incomprehensible error message]" and call it a day? The future of programming is literally just vibing with AI and hoping for the best. Senior developers are SHAKING right now. Stack Overflow is in SHAMBLES. We've gone from copy-pasting solutions to automating the entire process of not knowing what we're doing. Revolutionary.

Someone who can center a div both vertically AND horizontally without Googling it is basically a mythical creature. Frontend devs have been battling this since the dawn of CSS, cycling through margin auto, flexbox, grid, absolute positioning with transforms, and probably a blood sacrifice or two. The fact that it requires clarification of both axes just adds insult to injury. Flexbox finally made this trivial, but the trauma runs deep. We all still whisper about the dark days of table layouts and vertical-align: middle that never worked.

The great divide: opening curly brace on the same line vs. new line. You'd think we'd have solved world hunger by now, but nope—we're still fighting holy wars over bracket placement. Both camps are convinced they're right, both will die on this hill, and both will passive-aggressively "fix" each other's code during reviews. The left side is the K&R/Java/JavaScript crowd, the right is the Allman style devotees. Plot twist: your linter doesn't care about your feelings and will enforce whatever the team lead decided three years ago.

You know what's wild? The frontend framework wars have gotten so tribal that people will confidently argue about which one is superior without ever touching the "inferior" one. It's like reviewing a restaurant you've never been to based on Yelp comments. React devs catching strays from Svelte enthusiasts who sleep peacefully knowing they've never had to deal with useEffect dependencies or the joy of explaining why you need three different state management libraries. Meanwhile, they're out here living their best life with reactive declarations and no virtual DOM overhead. The real kicker? Both frameworks will be replaced by something else in 2 years anyway. Sweet dreams, framework warriors.

The ultimate developer crossroads: take the left path and risk your entire codebase exploding from ancient vulnerabilities in packages you haven't touched since 2019, or take the right path and watch your build fail spectacularly because some genius decided to push breaking changes in a minor version update. The left side gives you React2Shell vibes—probably running on dependencies so old they remember when jQuery was cool. The right side? Shai-Hulud, the giant sandworm from Dune, representing the chaos that emerges when you run npm update and suddenly 47 things break in production. Both paths lead to pain. Pick your poison: security nightmares or spending your Friday evening debugging why your app suddenly can't find module 'left-pad'.

Your body is literally optimized for survival, reproduction, and energy conservation. But here you are, a biological marvel powered by mitochondria and ATP, running a JavaScript framework that re-renders the entire DOM every time someone breathes near a state variable. The skeleton knows what's up—it's grinding those bones into dust converting JSX into browser-compatible JavaScript, then watching React's reconciliation algorithm desperately try to figure out which components changed. Your CPU fans are screaming, your RAM is crying, and somewhere deep in your system monitor, a process called "node" is consuming 4GB just to display a button. Meanwhile, your ancestors survived saber-toothed tigers with less computational effort than it takes your laptop to run `npm install`. Evolution really didn't prepare us for the bundle size of modern web development.

This comic brilliantly captures how different dev roles handle bugs with wildly different energy levels. JavaScript devs panic-flee from bugs like they're on fire (accurate), then copy-paste Stack Overflow solutions while literally burning, and convince themselves the weight of technical debt is totally fine. Classic. Backend devs go full Batman mode—methodically tracking down bugs with detective skills, then hunting down whichever dev committed the cursed code. The cape is metaphorical but the intimidation is real. Web devs are Spider-Man releasing bugs into production, then trying to "organize" them (read: make it worse), until someone yells "SUDO" and they have no choice but to comply. The power of root commands compels you! Technical Support are the Jedi mind-tricking users that obvious bugs are "features." Three times. With a straight face. It's not a crash, it's an unexpected exit feature! QA is literally Godzilla destroying everything in sight, then casually leaving. Their job is chaos, and they're excellent at it. C++ devs can't find bugs because they're too busy dealing with segfaults, memory leaks, and undefined behavior. Solution? Rage quit with rm -rf and the Infinity Gauntlet. If you can't fix it, delete everything.

The JavaScript ecosystem in a nutshell. Asked to solve a basic algorithmic problem? Just install a package for it. Why reinvent the wheel when someone's already published is-prime to npm with 47 dependencies, half of which are deprecated? The interviewer's face says it all—equal parts confusion, disbelief, and grudging respect for the audacity. Because let's be real, in production you'd probably use a library too. But maybe, just maybe, you should know how to check if a number is divisible by anything other than 1 and itself without reaching for your package manager.

Remember when your entire project was like 50KB? Yeah, me neither. Now you need to install 847 dependencies just to center a div. That node_modules folder has become so comically massive it's basically a black hole that consumes disk space faster than you can say "npm install." Modern web development: where your actual code is 2KB but your dependencies weigh more than a small car. Meanwhile jQuery is sitting there like "I was 30KB and did everything you needed" but nobody wants to hear it because we're too busy configuring webpack for the 47th time. Fun fact: The average node_modules folder contains more files than the number of stars visible to the naked eye. Okay I made that up, but it feels true.

The evolution of developer laziness has reached its final form. In 2020, some poor soul manually hardcoded every single number check like they were writing the Ten Commandments of Boolean Logic. "If it's 0, false. If it's 1, true. If it's 2, false..." Someone really sat there and typed out the entire pattern instead of just using the modulo operator like num % 2 === 0 . Fast forward to 2025, and we've collectively given up on thinking altogether. Why bother understanding basic math operations when you can just ask an AI to solve it for you? Just yeet the problem at OpenAI and pray it doesn't hallucinate a response that breaks production. The best part? The AI probably returns the hardcoded version from 2020 anyway. We went from reinventing the wheel to not even knowing what a wheel is anymore. Progress! 🚀