Billion Dollar Side Project 101

Content GiGa-Chad GiBi-Chad

Content Brenan Keller brenankeller A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicksidhd. First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

Spider-Man dropping hard truths at tech conferences now? Seems about right. While companies pour millions into making apps "intuitive" and "delightful" for users, developers are stuck with legacy codebases, outdated documentation, and build systems that require blood sacrifices to work properly. The irony is rich - we're expected to craft beautiful experiences while our own experience involves crying into coffee at 2AM because some dependency broke in 17 different places. Maybe if our dev tools weren't designed by sadists, we'd ship those fancy UX features on time!

We've gone from "npm install takes 5 minutes" to "npm install takes 5 minutes plus a commercial break." The dystopian future where even your package manager is monetized with unskippable ads before you can download your 47 dependencies for a hello world app. Imagine sitting there, desperately needing to install Express, but first you gotta watch ads for NordVPN, Raid Shadow Legends, and probably another JavaScript framework that'll be deprecated by next Tuesday. The character's dead-inside expression? That's every developer in 2030 realizing they need to subscribe to "npm Premium" just to skip ads on lodash. At least we'll finally have time to read the package documentation while waiting. Oh wait, who are we kidding—nobody reads those anyway.

The eternal saga of code reviews in one Slack message. Dude casually drops "i think cursor fixed it, can i merge?" and gets absolutely 875 replies of people tearing his code apart. That's not a code review—that's a digital intervention! Guarantee those replies are filled with "Actually..." and "Well, technically..." comments dissecting his cursor fix like it's a murder scene. Pro tip: never ask if you can merge unless you're prepared for your colleagues to discover every sin you've committed since learning to code.

Content Junior engineer Me when no one talks to me Senior engineer Me when everyone wants to talk to me nobody needs me what do you all want from me