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

The four stages of becoming a JavaScript developer: 1. Innocent excitement: "Ooh, a book about JavaScript!" 2. First encounter with callback hell: *uncontrollable sobbing* 3. Acceptance phase: *builds fortress of solitude with multiple monitors* 4. Final form: Bearded wisdom, thousand-yard stare, and a strong drink to numb the pain of yet another framework release. They grow up so fast when you feed them promises that never resolve.

Web development: a never-ending cycle of "fixing" what wasn't broken. The timeline is painfully accurate—each framework promising salvation from the previous one's "problems." Meanwhile, frontend devs are just collecting framework experience like Pokémon cards. The best part? In 2030, we'll probably invent HTML2 to fix whatever JavaScript monstrosity we've created by then. It's the circle of web life: build, complain, rebuild, repeat.

Spotted in the wild: a developer coding without their framework security blanket. The horror! Remember when we built websites with just HTML, CSS, and maybe some vanilla JavaScript? Now we need 237 npm packages just to center a div. The modern frontend ecosystem has convinced us that writing raw HTML is practically a war crime. Meanwhile, that "psychopath" probably shipped a working website while the rest of us were still configuring webpack.

When the product manager proudly announces support for 86-inch displays while the frontend devs are sweating bullets trying to figure out how to make that responsive layout not explode. Nothing quite captures the silent horror of realizing your carefully crafted CSS is about to be stretched across a display the size of a small country. The PM's excitement is directly proportional to the developer's existential dread. Meanwhile, somewhere in the codebase: max-width: 1200px; /* nobody will ever need more than this */

The seductive whisper of "come under the blankets, I have something to show you" takes a hilarious turn when instead of anything romantic, it's just a developer proudly displaying their bloated node_modules folder with 113,652 items taking up 120GB of precious disk space. Nothing says "I'm a JavaScript developer" quite like needing an entire hard drive just to import left-pad. The modern equivalent of "I swear this never happened before" is explaining to your PM why installing a simple date picker requires downloading half the internet.

That moment when the client shows off their new 86-inch ultra-wide monitor and your responsive design sweats nervously in the background. Five years of media queries and you still didn't prepare for THIS edge case. Tomorrow's standup will be fun: "So yeah, turns out our beautiful UI looks like a stretched piece of gum on the CEO's new ridiculous display." The best part? They'll blame the framework, not the absurdity of coding for every possible screen dimension known to mankind.