The Real Software Engineering Certification

Someone woke up and chose violence against Electron apps, and honestly? They're spitting facts. The rant reads like a manifesto written by someone who just watched Slack consume 4GB of RAM to display text messages. The whole "webapps were not supposed to have life-altering effects" bit hits different when you realize we're literally running entire operating systems inside Chrome just to display a to-do list. We went from "write once, run anywhere" to "download 300MB just to check your email." And that Telnet joke? Chef's kiss. Because apparently wrapping a website in Chromium and calling it "native" is somehow more secure than protocols from the 70s. At least Telnet was honest about its lack of security. The kicker is the "REAL Web Development" gaslighting at the end. Yeah, building a 500MB Discord client that's just a glorified browser wrapper is definitely what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned when he invented the web. We've been played harder than a fiddle at a bluegrass festival.

When the government declassifies documents, they redact sensitive info with those black boxes. Someone brilliantly applied that concept to C code, and honestly? It's a masterpiece. You've got #include<[REDACTED].h> , a function signature that's basically int [REDACTED]_[REDACTED]() , and even the comments are censored. The best part? You can still tell it's valid C syntax structure—the curly braces, the return statement, the multi-line comment format—but every actual identifier is blacked out. It's like trying to reverse engineer code where the NSA took a Sharpie to all the variable names. The function could be calculating missile trajectories or just returning 0, and we'll never know. Security through obscurity taken to its logical extreme.

Security teams spend months crafting elaborate phishing tests, only to have them defeated by developers who instinctively delete anything that isn't a GitHub notification or pizza delivery confirmation. The irony is palpable—you can't fail a security test if you never engage with it in the first place. The ultimate security through negligence. Meanwhile, the security team is patting themselves on the back thinking their training worked. Nope, just developer apathy winning again.

The ultimate cybersecurity troll! HackTheBox, a platform where security professionals hone their penetration testing skills, just delivered the digital equivalent of a pie to the face. First they dangle the coveted "#r00t" access (essentially god-mode privileges on a Unix system) in front of you, then—PSYCH!—not only did you not hack anything, but your IP just got banned for trying something "funny." Classic honeypot maneuver! It's like reaching for the cookie jar and the jar slams your fingers, takes a picture, and emails it to your boss. Nothing humbles a wannabe hacker faster than thinking they're Neo from The Matrix only to discover they're actually just the guy who gets caught in the first scene.

Ah, the classic developer passive-aggressive error message. Instead of just saying "endpoint not found" like a normal person, this dev decided to write a whole novel about the user's life choices. The highlighted code shows what happens when a 404 error occurs during a password reset - rather than blaming the system, the developer crafted an elaborate user backstory involving forgetfulness, remembering, logging in, account deletion, and then clicking a stale link. That sarcastic "Wow! What a journey!" at the end is the digital equivalent of a slow clap. I bet this dev also names variables after their exes.

Ah yes, the classic "fix" that fixes nothing. Committing your .env file to Git is like putting your house keys under the welcome mat and posting the address on Twitter. Sure, your code errors are gone... along with your database credentials, API keys, and whatever shred of respect your senior dev had for you. But hey, ship it.