HTMX Supremacy Gang

The smugness is palpable! Flynn Rider here represents the web dev who's convinced native apps are dinosaurs heading for extinction. Meanwhile, native devs are quietly enjoying their superior performance, offline capabilities, and battery efficiency while the web stack changes completely every six months. Sure, web tech is "everywhere" - just like that restaurant with 2-star reviews. It's there, but do you really want it? The irony is that this meme was probably viewed on a native app because the web version crashed.

The expectation vs. reality of frontend development is perfectly captured in this Squid Game cookie comparison. You start thinking it's just drawing a simple triangle—clean lines, minimal effort. Then reality hits and suddenly you're meticulously carving a fractal nightmare of nested triangles where one wrong move breaks everything. Just like when your CSS looks perfect until someone opens it on a different browser and your beautiful design transforms into an eldritch horror. The only difference is that in Squid Game you die quickly; with frontend, you suffer for eternity trying to center a div.

Oh honey, you thought customer service "Ankur" was a real person? PLOT TWIST! The moment they asked for a React component, our "totally human" friend spat out an ENTIRE todo list app faster than I can say "suspicious"! 💅 That's not just any code vomit - it's a perfectly formatted React component with useState hooks, task management functions, and styled components ALL IN ONE MESSAGE. Because nothing screams "I'm flesh and blood" like regurgitating 30 lines of JSX without breaking a sweat! The betrayal! The drama! The syntax highlighting!

Ah, the four-step career assassination tutorial! Nothing sends a frontend developer into existential crisis faster than watching someone test their "responsive" design by actually... *checks notes*... using different devices. The psychological warfare begins with showing off multiple devices, continues with the developer watching in horror as their beautiful creation morphs into an eldritch abomination across screens, and culminates with the coup de grâce: printing the monstrosity to immortalize their shame. Somewhere, a CSS media query is crying. Somewhere else, a Bootstrap developer is pouring another drink.

Ah, the infamous "leftpad incident" – when the entire JavaScript ecosystem collapsed because someone got mad about a package name. 11 lines of code that could've been written by a junior dev in 5 minutes brought down Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify. Why? Because the modern web is basically a house of cards built on thousands of dependencies that nobody actually reads. This is why I drink. The most powerful companies in the world, with billions in market cap, were paralyzed because they couldn't figure out how to pad a string with spaces without importing a package. NPM: Need Package Madness. Where we'll happily import 700MB of node_modules to avoid writing a for loop.

Found in the wild depths of npm: a package called "react-buttplug" that connects React to... well, exactly what you think. The description "Here there be WASM" is the cherry on top of this cursed sundae. The fact that someone spent actual development hours creating a React provider for Buttplug.io (a real "intimate hardware" API) and then published it with that name is peak developer humor. Five years later and zero dependents - shocking absolutely no one. This is what happens when you tell developers "you can build anything" without adding "but please don't."