Skill decay 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.

The programmer's version of muscle atrophy. Take a short vacation and suddenly you're staring at your IDE like it's written in hieroglyphics. Your brain has somehow managed to uninstall decades of programming knowledge faster than Windows deletes system32. And yet, we'll still confidently tell new devs "it's like riding a bike" when they ask if coding skills fade. Spoiler alert: the bike is on fire and you've forgotten what legs are.

The graph perfectly captures the asymmetry of our coding journey. Learning code? A methodical staircase where you climb one concept at a time. Forgetting code? A frictionless slide into oblivion at 2x the speed. That algorithm you spent weeks mastering? Gone in 3 days of vacation. Your meticulously crafted regex? Vanished after switching projects. The brain's garbage collector is ruthlessly efficient at deallocating exactly what you'll need tomorrow.