With Obligations Its Impure Fun

The dream: solving elegant algorithmic puzzles, crafting beautiful architectures, and refactoring code until it's poetry. The reality: debugging production at 2 PM because someone needs that feature shipped yesterday, wrestling with legacy code that predates the dinosaurs, and explaining to stakeholders why "just add a button" isn't actually a 5-minute task.

Programming without financial obligations would genuinely be incredible. You could spend three weeks bikeshedding over whether to use a factory pattern or a builder pattern. You could rewrite your entire codebase in Rust just because it felt right. You could finally finish that side project instead of abandoning it at 47% completion.

But instead, here we are—small dinners, big dreams, and a GitHub profile full of repositories named "cool-project-idea" that haven't been touched in 2 years. At least the salary's decent, right? Right?