Don't Get Burned

You start your day thinking "I'll just tweak this button color real quick." Two hours later, you've somehow installed 47 dependencies, each one pulling in 200 more of its "friends," and your node_modules folder has achieved sentience and is now larger than the entire Windows operating system. That one "lightweight" color picker library? Yeah, it needed React, three different date formatters, and something called "left-pad-2-electric-boogaloo." Your project went from 50MB to 850MB, your build time tripled, and you're pretty sure one of those packages is just someone's cryptocurrency miner. But hey, the button is now #3B82F6 instead of #2563EB, so totally worth burning down the entire city for it.

Content

Content Tawa 4302 4303 dustrat weapon-j return output MemoryError: Unable to allocate 280. TiB for an array I'm limited by the technology of my time

Modern devs out here with 16GB of RAM, gaming PCs that could render the entire universe, PS5s, and somehow still manage to make Electron apps that eat memory like it's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Meanwhile, legends back in the day were crafting entire operating systems and games on 2MB of RAM with hardware that had less computing power than today's smart toaster. The contrast is brutal: we've got 8,000x more RAM and yet Chrome tabs still bring our machines to their knees. Those old-school devs were writing assembly, optimizing every single byte, and shipping masterpieces on a PlayStation 1 and Super Nintendo. They didn't have Stack Overflow, npm packages, or the luxury of importing 500MB of node_modules to display "Hello World." The SpongeBob meme format captures it perfectly: modern devs looking sophisticated with all their fancy hardware versus the raw, unhinged genius of developers who had to make magic happen with constraints that would make today's engineers weep. Respect to those who coded when memory management wasn't optional—it was survival.

Content Software is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it. -Random Senior Dev Picture from 39th birthday party

Content Computer Facts computerfact "why would you use X" "i do not understand X" "only an idiot would use X" "i am masking my insecurity and ignorance about X with aggression" "you should obviously use Y instead of X" " understand Y. if we shift the conversation to Y i can feel powerful again.' 6:35 AM - 18 May 2019