HTMX Supremacy Gang

The mountain of web development gets steeper with each framework. HTML? Just a gentle slope. CSS? A bit more challenging. Bootstrap? Now we're cruising downhill! But then comes React Native and suddenly you're falling off a cliff. That moment when you think you've mastered frontend development only to have React Native remind you that cross-platform mobile dev is where dreams go to die. Ten years of experience and I'm still googling "why is my flexbox not working on Android but fine on iOS."

Job listings these days are basically a tech buzzword bingo card. Left side: backend technologies like Postgres, Kafka, Kubernetes. Right side: frontend stack with React, Vue, and Tailwind. And recruiters? They want you to be an expert in all of it . The painful truth every developer knows: companies post "entry-level" positions requiring mastery of 15 different technologies, 8 years of experience, and probably the ability to refactor legacy code while blindfolded. Meanwhile, the actual job is maintaining a CRUD app from 2012. The cherry on top? The salary is "competitive" – which translates to "we'll pay you half what you're worth but hey, we have free snacks in the break room!"

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.

In this parallel universe, everything's just slightly... off. VScode has gone green, React's lost its atom, Rust is having an identity crisis with those dollar signs, PHP actually looks cool, GitHub's fox is on fire, Ubuntu's gone minimal, JavaScript is... well, still JavaScript (some constants across all universes), and that blue creature is what happens when you let Go's mascot hang out with npm for too long. It's like someone described our tech stack to an AI from 2010 and said "just wing it." The multiverse of tech madness where your pull requests would probably create black holes.

Asked Copilot to create a simple flexbox layout and it decided to spawn the Inception of div containers. That conditional at the top should've been v-if="canCreateNightmare" . Nothing says "I'm helping" like turning a 3-line layout into the HTML equivalent of a Russian nesting doll. And the best part? All that code just to add the same gap-4 everywhere. Efficiency at its finest!

Poor vanilla JS developer sitting in a pool of judgment while everyone else enjoys their framework-enhanced lives. The classic "why aren't you using React/Angular/Vue?" interrogation that happens at every dev meetup. Writing raw JavaScript in 2023 is like showing up to a gunfight with a sharpened pencil – technically a weapon, but you're gonna have a bad time. The framework folks will never let you swim in peace!