The Four Stages Of Developer Descent Into Madness

The four stages of developer evolution, beautifully depicted as increasingly unhinged clown makeup:

Stage 1: The innocent belief your code is "good and understandable" because your colleagues said so. Bless your heart.

Stage 2: The realization that clean code belongs in textbooks, not production. In the real world, that pristine architecture just slows down delivery.

Stage 3: The existential crisis when you discover those elegant abstractions you spent weeks on are worthless after the first requirement change.

Stage 4: The final form - admitting you never formally studied programming while your codebase burns in the background. Yet somehow, the system still runs.

And that's how we all end up maintaining legacy code written by circus performers.