Forgetting Memes

Learning a new language or framework is that satisfying climb up the stairs—steady progress, dopamine hits with each concept mastered, Stack Overflow bookmarks multiplying. Then you take a two-week vacation, switch projects, or just look at production fires for a month straight. Suddenly you're staring at your own code like it's written in ancient Sumerian. The forgetting curve is real and it's exponential. The only prevention? Build useless side projects you'll never finish. It's not procrastination, it's spaced repetition.

Ah yes, the universal truth of our profession. Spend three months mastering a new framework with painful, step-by-step progress, only to forget it all in approximately 2.5 seconds after switching projects. The left side shows our heroic climb up Mount Knowledge—slow, methodical, and filled with Stack Overflow pilgrimages. The right side? That's your brain doing its best Olympic ski jump impression the moment you don't touch that codebase for a week. I've got decade-old code I wrote that might as well be hieroglyphics now. Memory is just cache, and we all know how reliable cache invalidation is...

THE ABSOLUTE BETRAYAL of your own brain when you return from vacation! There you are, staring at the login screen for the tool you've supposedly used EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. of your professional existence, and suddenly—POOF!—your password has vanished from your memory like it was thrown into the fires of Mount Doom! Your fingers hover over the keyboard in a pathetic dance of desperation while your colleagues watch your soul leave your body. The walk of shame to IT for a password reset is the modern developer's walk of atonement. And don't even get me started on when you finally get in and can't remember how a single function works! The AUDACITY of our brains to take PTO when we do!