Null reference Memes

The dev explaining their "brilliant" fix is the perfect embodiment of that moment when you've spent 8 hours tracking down a null reference exception only to discover it was caused by another null reference exception. It's the coding equivalent of finding out your car won't start because the battery is dead, and the battery is dead because you left the lights on, which you did because the light sensor was broken. The nested dependency hell we all pretend to understand while nodding wisely at standup meetings. The blank stare from the listener is all of us when a colleague tries to explain their spaghetti code architecture. "So you see, the string was empty because the config loader failed silently which happened because the JSON parser threw an exception that got swallowed by a try-catch block I wrote at 2am three months ago."