I Am An Indie Hacker

The sacred relationship between a developer and their IDE of choice. After years of customizing shortcuts, plugins, and themes until it's barely recognizable, you'd sooner switch careers than text editors. That "Pin to taskbar" option is basically a marriage proposal. The rest are just temporary flings you use when your main IDE crashes.

The accuracy is devastating. Modern developers have basically turned into professional copy-paste artists who panic the moment their WiFi drops. "Vibe coding" and "jr dev" are having the time of their lives in the shallow end, while "reading doc" is drowning in the background because nobody actually reads documentation anymore—why would you when Stack Overflow exists? But the real kicker? "Debugging without internet" is literally at the bottom of the ocean, dead and forgotten. Because let's be honest, trying to fix bugs without Google is like trying to perform surgery blindfolded. No Stack Overflow? No ChatGPT? No frantically searching "why is my code broken"? You might as well be coding in the Stone Age. The evolution is complete: we went from reading manuals to Googling everything to now just asking AI to write our code. Documentation? That's boomer energy. Debugging offline? That's a skill your ancestors had.

Ah, the battle-hardened senior dev vs. the fresh-faced junior. The senior is literally taking arrows from all sides—office politics, changing requirements, and those ever-looming deadlines—while still finding time to compliment the junior's CSS button. It's the perfect metaphor for tech career progression. By the time you reach senior level, you're not just writing code—you're a human shield absorbing corporate chaos while trying to mentor the next generation who think their biggest achievement is centering a div. The junior has no idea what's coming. None of us did. One day you're excited about button styling, the next you're in eight hours of meetings discussing "synergy" while your Jira tickets multiply like rabbits.

Ever wondered why your laptop fans sound like they're preparing for liftoff? Look no further than your node_modules folder! While your actual code might be a svelte stormtrooper, those dependencies are an absolute unit that would make the Death Star blush. 500 lines of your code somehow requires 500MB of someone else's code. And heaven forbid you run npm install on a weak WiFi connection – you could literally go make a sandwich, watch a Star Wars trilogy, and come back to find it still downloading the "essential" packages needed to center a div.

The ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for developers. When GitHub goes down, it's not just an outage—it's a company-wide productivity apocalypse wrapped in a legitimate excuse. Your manager walks by demanding results? "GitHub is down." Suddenly you're not slacking, you're a victim of circumstances. Can't push code, can't pull updates, can't even pretend to look at pull requests. It's like a snow day for programmers, except instead of building snowmen, you're browsing Reddit and calling it "waiting for critical infrastructure to recover." The beauty is in the legitimacy. You're not lying—you genuinely can't work. Well, you could work locally, but let's not get crazy here. The entire modern development workflow revolves around GitHub like planets around the sun. No version control? That's basically coding in the dark ages. Manager's instant "oh, carry on" is chef's kiss. Even they know the drill. When GitHub's down, the whole dev team enters a state of sanctioned limbo.

Calling HTML a programming language is like calling a hammer a power tool. The father's reaction is the software industry's collective response to anyone who thinks markup is actual programming. That "10 seconds to get off my property" hits harder than a stack overflow error at 4:59 PM on a Friday. Real programmers would rather debug a recursive function than listen to someone brag about their HTML "coding skills."