Best practices Memes

Every junior dev's origin story begins with the sacred words: "I could totally build this from scratch better than [insert literally any established library/framework here]." Then six months later you're debugging your homemade authentication system at 3 AM, crying into your energy drink, wondering why your triangular wheel isn't gaining traction. The universe has blessed us with React, Angular, Vue, and a million battle-tested libraries that have survived the trenches of production environments. But NO—you're gonna write your own state management solution because "it's not that complicated." Spoiler alert: it IS that complicated, and those weird-looking wheels in the picture? That's your custom-built solution that "works perfectly fine" until someone tries to actually use it. Save yourself the existential crisis and just npm install the dang thing. Your future self will thank you when you're not maintaining a Frankenstein monster of spaghetti code that only you understand.

COBOL assignments are already punishment enough without the professor's commentary. First they tell you to add comments, so you write "*> move A to B" which is literally just repeating what the code says in slightly different words. Then they hit you with the "explain WHY not WHAT" lecture, so you craft these beautiful explanatory comments about copying values around. The code went from self-documenting to over-documented faster than a mainframe processes a batch job. Nothing says "I understand good practices" quite like explaining why you're moving variables in a language where everything is already painfully verbose.

Ah yes, the classic "I'm doing this for the team" excuse when really you're just trying to remember what the hell that function does three hours from now. We all pretend we're being altruistic team players writing detailed comments and documentation, but deep down we know the truth: our memory is about as reliable as JavaScript's type system. You'll write a brilliant algorithm at 2 AM, feel like a genius, and then come back the next morning staring at your own code like it's written in ancient hieroglyphics. That's when you realize past-you was actually looking out for future-you, not the junior dev who might inherit this codebase. The real MVP is the comment that says "don't touch this, I don't know why it works either."

You know that moment when you're casually browsing production code and stumble upon a `TODO: remove before release` comment? Yeah, that's the face of someone who just realized they shipped their technical debt to millions of users. The best part? That TODO has probably been sitting there for 6 months, survived 47 code reviews, passed all CI/CD pipelines, and nobody noticed until a customer found the debug console still logging "TESTING PAYMENT FLOW LOL" in production. The comment is now a permanent resident of your codebase, a monument to the optimism we all had during that sprint planning meeting.

You copy the exact code from the documentation, hit run, and suddenly you're staring at an error message telling you that what you just did is forbidden. Turns out "demonstration purposes" is developer-speak for "this will absolutely break in production but it makes for a clean screenshot." Documentation writers love pulling this move—they'll show you the simplest possible implementation that violates every best practice known to humanity, then slap a tiny disclaimer at the bottom that you'll only notice after you've already committed it to main. No error handling, hardcoded credentials, synchronous calls blocking the entire thread... it's all there, beautifully formatted and completely unusable. The real kicker? Half the time the "correct" way isn't even documented. You're just supposed to magically know that the example was a trap.

Using toLowerCase() or toUpperCase() in your conditional logic? That's some big brain energy right there. Most devs just slap these methods on strings for case-insensitive comparisons without a second thought, but the real ones know this is a minefield of locale-specific chaos waiting to explode. The Turkish İ problem is legendary: in Turkish locale, the uppercase of 'i' is 'İ' (with a dot), not 'I', and lowercase 'I' becomes 'ı' (without a dot). So your innocent if (userInput.toLowerCase() === "admin") suddenly breaks when deployed in Turkey. There's also the German ß that uppercases to "SS", and Greek sigma has different lowercase forms depending on position. Unicode is wild, and these methods respect locale by default in some languages. Pro tip: use toLocaleUpperCase() or toLocaleLowerCase() when you actually care about proper linguistic handling, or better yet, use case-insensitive comparison methods that don't mutate strings. The lion knows what's up.

You know your documentation is top-tier when it just says what the thing is. Variable named "cat"? Better add a comment that says "// cat" so future developers understand it's a cat. Function called getUserData()? Slap a "// gets user data" on there and call it a day. It's like labeling a box "BOX" and feeling productive about your organizational skills. The comment provides exactly zero additional information beyond what the code already screams at you. But hey, at least the comment count looks impressive in the metrics report. Pro tip: If your comment just repeats the function name in sentence form, you've achieved peak uselessness. Congratulations, you're now compliant with the "every function must have a comment" policy while contributing absolutely nothing to human knowledge.