What Programming Is Actually Like

The expectation vs. reality gap in programming is brutal! Non-programmers imagine us as mysterious hackers typing at lightning speed, fingers dancing across keyboards like we're hacking the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the actual programming experience is just staring blankly at the screen for hours, questioning every life decision that led to this bug. That intense "calculating the meaning of existence" face isn't deep thinking—it's us wondering if we should've become baristas instead after spending 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon.