Knowledge retention 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...