The Mentor's Dilemma

The elegant theory vs brutal reality of Git in one perfect comic. First panel: "This is Git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model." Second panel: "Cool. How do we use it?" Third panel: The devastating truth bomb: "NO IDEA. JUST MEMORIZE THESE SHELL COMMANDS AND TYPE THEM TO SYNC UP. IF YOU GET ERRORS, SAVE YOUR WORK ELSEWHERE, DELETE THE PROJECT, CLONE THE REPOSITORY, AND DOWNLOAD A FRESH COPY." Every developer nodding right now has definitely nuked a repository after seeing a merge conflict that looked like an encrypted alien message. We all pretend to understand Git's elegant theory, but when push comes to shove (pun intended), we're just typing incantations and praying to the version control gods.

The eternal battle between "clean code" zealots and the pragmatic hackers who actually ship features. First panel: Someone proudly declares they like "clean code" - that magical unicorn every bootcamp graduate puts on their resume. Second panel: Someone dares to ask what that actually means. Third panel: "It means he's afraid of useful code" - the brutal truth bomb drops. Fourth panel: The clean coder desperately denies it. Final panels: And then we see the "scary" code - a fast inverse square root function that's actually efficient and solves a real problem, but doesn't follow the sacred "clean code" commandments. The horror! Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a "clean code" purist like a function that prioritizes performance over readability. Meanwhile, the rest of us are just trying to make the damn thing work before the deadline.

Content Documentation is like sex. When it's good, it's very good. When it's bad, it's better than nothing.

Content Thabiso magwaza 3rd Software Engineer at Discovery Limited 1W Software job postings be like: - Bs Computer science degree, master in machine learning and Al - Competent in C, C, Go, Javascript, Assembly, Linux and SQL - Competent with Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure - Competent in Web Design, back-end design, database design, big data - Must have been to the moon at least once, fought in WW2 and can ride a parashoot - A pilot's licence would be an advantage 6, 9 757 Comments Like E Comment ( Share

The classic learning curve of doom! Newbie programmers staring up at the programming staircase of despair where even the first step (Hello World) looks like Mount Everest. Meanwhile, they're already Googling "how to build Skynet with no programming experience" and wondering why their neural networks aren't sentient yet. The irony is that most tutorials literally start with printing "Hello World" to the console, but somehow folks want to skip straight to building the next ChatGPT without understanding variables. It's like trying to compose a symphony when you can't even play "Hot Cross Buns" on the recorder.

In English, the letters 'i' and 'j' are just skinny little characters that barely make an impact. But in programming? Those loop counters bench press your entire codebase. Nothing quite like watching your nested for loops with i,j variables crush through 10,000 iterations without breaking a sweat. Those humble little variables carry the weight of algorithms that would make mere mortals collapse. Seven years into my career and I'm still naming my loop counters i,j,k like it's some sacred tradition passed down from the elders of computer science.