Let There Be Light

The eternal battle between self-proclaimed "real programmers" and the rising "vibe coders" who just ship stuff! This post brilliantly skewers the gatekeeping culture in software development. On one side, we have the GitHub purists judging everyone's code quality, design patterns, and commit messages. On the other, we have people who might Google "how to center a div" 10 times daily but somehow manage to ship working products. The real magic happens when you've internalized enough patterns that you can focus on building rather than constantly looking things up. It's not about memorizing algorithms or being a "real programmer" – it's about getting stuff done while maintaining enough quality to sleep at night. Fun fact: Some of the most successful products in tech history were built by people who would fail a traditional whiteboard coding interview. The code that runs the world isn't always pretty, but it works!

A lonely C++ programmer stands in the corner of a party, nursing a drink while contemplating memory management strategies. Meanwhile, the "vibe coders" and "latest JavaScript framework coders" are having the time of their lives, blissfully unaware that pointers even exist. It's like watching someone who knows how engines work watching TikTokers who think cars run on magic and good vibes. The C++ dev silently judges while manually freeing memory that nobody else even knows they're allocating.

Nobody wants to touch those crusty desktop frameworks from the 90s anymore. Qt and WinForms? Hard pass. But wrap a glorified browser in a desktop shell and call it "cross-platform" and suddenly everyone's throwing confetti. "Look mom, I made a desktop app with 500MB of node_modules and it only takes 8 seconds to launch a hello world!" The absolute state of desktop development in 2023 - where your app is basically a website that somehow uses more RAM than Photoshop.

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."

That moment when the "How to Become a Front End Developer" tutorial shows you looking at TWO screens of incomprehensible code simultaneously. Because nothing says "beginner-friendly" like drowning in nested divs while holding a tablet full of more code like it's light weekend reading. The marketing team really nailed this one. "Hey, want to become a frontend dev? Just casually browse 8,000 lines of code on multiple devices while looking pensively at your keyboard! You'll be hired in no time!"

Behold, the modern tech tragedy in three acts: Act I: "I'll let GPT-5 refactor our entire codebase!" Act II: *50+ files changed, 10k+ lines updated, beautiful modular code with best practices* Act III: "None of it works." The perfect illustration of AI's current relationship with coding: makes everything look incredible while secretly plotting your application's demise. That beautiful, clean code is like a gorgeous sports car with no engine—pretty to look at but utterly useless for actually getting anywhere. The punchline "But boy it was beautiful to watch" is the developer equivalent of "The surgery was successful, but the patient died." At least we'll have nicely formatted code to stare at while the production server burns!