Only React Devs Will Relate

The Twitter bird (or any blue bird, really) first rejects Tailwind CSS with disgust, only to later vomit it back up after reluctantly consuming it. It's the classic frontend dev journey: "Utility classes?! That's just inline CSS with extra steps! I'm a proper developer who writes clean, semantic CSS!" *5 minutes of trying to maintain a massive CSS codebase later* "OH GOD GIVE ME THE UTILITY CLASSES PLEASE I'LL DO ANYTHING!" We've all been there. First you mock it, then you try it, then you can't live without it. The circle of CSS frameworks.

Frontend developers just collectively shuddered at this monstrosity. That circular screen is basically saying "Have fun making your responsive designs work on THIS, suckers!" It's like someone looked at the rectangular screens we've been optimizing for decades and thought, "You know what would be fun? Geometry warfare!" Imagine the CSS nightmares. Your perfectly crafted grid layout? Dead. Your meticulously positioned elements? Homeless. Your sanity? Gone. The corners don't even exist anymore! Where do notifications go? Into the void, apparently. The person asking for ONE reason not to buy it clearly hasn't spent hours debugging why their div is 1px off. Meanwhile, frontend devs are already updating their resumes with "survived circular viewport trauma" as a skill.

That moment when your teapot is missing half its spout but you still try to pour tea with it anyway. Just like trying to follow that React tutorial from 2022 that casually omits the fact that half the API was deprecated last month. "Just import createClass—oh wait, that's gone. Um, just use componentWillMount—nope, that's gone too." The modern dev experience is basically pouring molten chocolate through a broken teapot and hoping your cup catches more than your countertop.

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.

The eternal struggle between React hooks! Top panel shows the primitive useState hook - basic, straightforward, but kinda boring (hence the darkness). Bottom panel? That's when you discover useEffect and suddenly your face is illuminated with the divine light of side effects! Finally, a way to increment that counter without manually calling setCount everywhere. The transformation is basically the coding equivalent of discovering fire. Just wait until this dev discovers the reducer pattern and their head literally explodes.

Ah, the eternal tech cycle. A new library emerges and suddenly everyone's ready to toss their 300MB node_modules folder into the trash. HTMX promises the revolutionary concept of *checks notes* using HTML attributes to do AJAX. Meanwhile, React developers who've spent years mastering component lifecycles are quietly updating their résumés while muttering "it's just a phase." The full stack devs are playing both sides so they always come out on top. Classic framework warfare where the only winners are the people writing Medium articles about "Why I Switched From X to Y and Increased Performance by 9000%."