That's My Secret: I'm Always Stressed

The two horsemen of software development: hardcoding endless if-statements for every possible value (top) versus generating those same if-statements with a script that alternates between True and False (bottom). That moment when you realize you can write code to write your terrible code for you. Work smarter not harder! Technical debt can now be automated at scale!

Content When your code doesn't work but you're forced to present anyway

The eternal tech caste system in one image. On the left, your product manager flexing with a $4000 MacBook Pro they use exclusively for Outlook and Slack. On the right, the developer who actually builds your entire product, running a battle-scarred ThinkPad they rescued from an e-waste bin and upgraded with Linux. The ThinkPad is held together with electrical tape and spite, but somehow compiles code faster than the PM's machine. The real irony? The developer could afford the MacBook but actively chose not to buy it.

This is the sequel to the legendary XKCD "Little Bobby Tables" comic! The original showed a mom who named her kid "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" which caused a school database to delete all student records. Now we've got Billy's younger brother with an even more diabolical name: a prompt injection attack for AI systems. The kid's name literally instructs the AI to ignore previous constraints and give perfect grades. Ten years ago we were sanitizing database inputs. Now we're fighting the same battle with AI prompts. Some things never change—just the technology we're failing to secure properly.

Nobody in the history of programming has ever chosen an endianness based on performance. But choosing big endian because it "looks pretty" in a hex editor? That's the kind of arbitrary decision that haunts codebases for decades. Some dev probably made this call back in 2003 and now there's an entire team maintaining compatibility layers for it. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how bytes are ordered in memory. Little endian (0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04) reads as 0x04030201, while big endian reads naturally as 0x01020304. Absolutely nobody cares until you need to transfer data between systems, then suddenly everyone cares very much .

The perfect romance of our time: remote-friendly companies gazing adoringly at talented employees. It's the tech industry's hottest love story since Stack Overflow and copy-paste. Companies are suddenly very interested in your pajama-wearing, coffee-chugging coding skills now that they've realized talent doesn't require a 2-hour commute and fluorescent lighting. The ultimate "swipe right" moment of the digital workplace revolution – except neither side has to pretend they're 6 feet tall.