Be A Real Programmer

Content Vishal VishalMalvi Me a as developer trying to understand legacy code

The five stages of grief, but make it programming. That moment when you revisit your code from 24 hours ago and go through shock, denial, confusion, horror, and finally the crushing realization that you wrote that abomination. The best part? You have absolutely zero recollection of your thought process. It's like discovering ancient hieroglyphics except you were the sleep-deprived pharaoh who wrote them. And now you have to decipher your own madness before the sprint review. Good luck explaining to your future self why you thought that 17-nested if-statement was "elegant."

Content Next time you bitch about how many months it took you to get that first entry level job as a developer, just remember that this guy exists and it took him 52 years since graduation to get an entry level job in his field.

You write some completely incomprehensible OpenGL code with function names that look like keyboard smashing—glCreateShader, glCreateBuffer, glDraw(gdjshdbb)—sprinkle in some magic numbers like 69 and 420 because why not, and somehow a beautiful gradient triangle appears on screen. Graphics programming is basically alchemy where you sacrifice readability to the GPU gods and get rewarded with pretty colors. The best part? You have zero idea why it works, but you're not touching that code ever again.

You know that feeling when you've been grinding in Vim for hours, navigating through code with hjkl like a keyboard warrior, making surgical edits with macros and registers? Then you finally finish your work and confidently type :wq! to save and quit... except you forgot to actually save and just rage-quit the entire session instead. The train absolutely demolishing that school bus is the perfect metaphor for your Vim session getting obliterated when you exit without saving. All those beautiful changes, refactorings, and bug fixes? Gone. Reduced to atoms. The force-quit command ( :q! ) doesn't negotiate—it just destroys everything in its path with zero remorse. Pro tip: Always double-check that 'w' before the 'q'. Your future self will thank you when you don't have to rewrite 200 lines of code from memory.

Ah, the elegant art of being simultaneously clever and ridiculous. This Python function is the programming equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly—with style. Instead of the boring old num % 2 == 0 check that peasant programmers use, this galaxy-brain developer created a string "eovdden" and indexes into it using num % 2 as the position, followed by another 2 (which does absolutely nothing). The string is cleverly arranged so position 0 gives "even" and position 1 gives "odd" — making this the most unnecessarily complex even/odd checker in existence. It's like building a Rube Goldberg machine when a light switch would do. And those sunglasses emojis? They know exactly what they've done. Pure chaotic evil masquerading as code.