Trying To Learn A Young Language, Using A Tutorial That's More Than A Year Old

When a React developer proudly announces they built Windows 11's start menu and someone simply asks "why," you know you're witnessing peak software development philosophy. The cherry on top is the performance question being dismissed with "I try not to let such considerations get in the way of doing great work." Translation: "Who cares if it takes 8GB of RAM to show a menu? I used my favorite framework!" And that, friends, is why your PC freezes for 3 seconds when you click the Windows button. But hey, at least some React dev got to pad their resume!

Ah, the classic "entry-level" job posting that requires mastery of the entire tech stack universe! The recruiter is essentially asking for a frontend dev (JavaScript/React/Redux), backend engineer (Node/Mongo), and DevOps specialist (Docker/Kubernetes/AWS) all rolled into one human being—at the price of one salary, of course. It's like walking into a restaurant and ordering a 5-star chef, server, and dishwasher combo meal for the price of a single hamburger. The tech industry's expectations have gotten so absurd that we're practically one job posting away from "must have invented time travel and colonized Mars by age 25."

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."

Nothing shatters the blissful state of flow like a surprise standup announcement with executive attendance. One minute you're peacefully wrestling with AngularJS dependencies, finally making progress after three hours of debugging—the next, you're frantically rehearsing how to explain why that "quick fix" from last week is still "almost done" while simultaneously trying to remember if you pushed any commits this sprint. The transition from coding euphoria to existential dread happens faster than a JavaScript framework becomes deprecated.

512GB of RAM?! The absolute AUDACITY of Apple to think I wouldn't immediately fill that with 2,457 Chrome tabs of Stack Overflow solutions I'll "read later." That Mac Studio isn't a computer—it's an enabler for my browser tab hoarding addiction! Web developers see all that memory and literally start salivating like it's beachfront property they just inherited. "Finally, I can run my React app, Slack, AND keep my 'JavaScript Promises Explained' tab open without my computer bursting into flames!" 🔥

Nothing kills the coding flow state quite like a surprise standup with the CEO. One minute you're blissfully wrestling with AngularJS dependencies, finally getting that service to inject properly, and the next you're frantically trying to remember what you actually accomplished yesterday besides "investigating solutions" (aka Stack Overflow rabbit holes). The sheer panic of having to translate "I spent 6 hours fixing a bug caused by a missing semicolon" into corporate speak while the CEO watches is the true horror of modern development. Bonus anxiety points if you've been secretly refactoring the codebase because whoever wrote it originally should be banned from touching a keyboard.