You Son Of A Gun

FIVE TABS?! FIVE?!?! *clutches RAM dramatically* Are you TRYING to insult the entire developer community?! The audacity of suggesting we limit ourselves to a mere FIVE Chrome tabs is the most ridiculous thing I've heard since someone said "this code will work on the first try." Every self-respecting developer needs AT LEAST 47 Stack Overflow tabs, 12 documentation pages, 8 GitHub issues, 3 YouTube tutorials, and that one tab with the solution you found 3 weeks ago but were too afraid to close. Chrome eating 16GB of RAM isn't a bug—it's a lifestyle choice, darling! 💅

Content StackOverflow was written without the help of StackOverflow The first compiler was written in Assembly The first assembler was written in machine code The first operating system was written without one

In your head, it's all rainbows and elegant algorithms. You're basically the next Linus Torvalds, crafting revolutionary code that will change humanity forever. Then reality hits—semicolons missing, undefined variables everywhere, and that one bracket you can't find for 45 minutes. The dream of clean, beautiful code crumbles into a nightmare of Stack Overflow searches and desperate console.log statements. Programming: where expectations and reality have never met and never will.

The natural evolution of developer communities. Regular programming forums? Meh, good luck finding an answer that isn't "just Google it." Linux folks? Suddenly formal attire and a surprising willingness to help—as long as you've read all 47 man pages first. Web3 communities? Grinning ear-to-ear because they've convinced themselves that storing a JPEG on a blockchain for $800 in gas fees is revolutionary. The hierarchy of delusion is complete.

The eternal programmer delusion, laid bare in four panels of crushing reality. Society thinks we're hardware wizards, surgically repairing computers with screwdrivers like some kind of digital mechanic. Our parents believe we're rocket scientists in lab coats, probably inventing the next Facebook-killer between family dinners. Meanwhile, our self-image is that of a beautiful mind—equations floating around our heads as we solve impossibly complex algorithms. The devastating truth? We're just frantically Googling "How to use dates in JavaScript" for the fifth time this week because nobody—NOBODY—can remember how that cursed Date object works. The duality of programmer existence: cosmic genius in our minds, desperate Googler in reality.

The guy playing ping pong with a door handle instead of a paddle is basically all of us diving into a new programming language without bothering to read the docs first. Sure, you could spend three hours reading proper syntax and best practices, or you could just start hacking away and Google error messages as they appear. Who has time for documentation when there's a deadline tomorrow and Stack Overflow exists? Ten years in the industry and I still find myself doing this. The cycle never ends - new framework drops, copy-paste some examples, break everything, fix it somehow, and suddenly you're an "expert" giving talks about it.