It Works Or Not, There Is No In Between

Frontend: Peaceful meadow, happy baby, sunshine, and butterflies. Life is good. Backend: Same developer, same baby—except now the baby's a demon, buildings are on fire, and civilization is collapsing. The eternal truth of web development—users see your pretty buttons while you're wrestling with database connections that randomly decide to commit seppuku at 2 AM on a Tuesday. The real horror isn't the code you write; it's the infrastructure keeping it alive.

The five stages of beginner developer delusion, perfectly captured in skeletal form. It starts with innocent enthusiasm, quickly escalates to "I'm learning React to learn JavaScript" (which is like saying "I'm learning to fly a Boeing 747 to understand gravity"), then rapidly descends into the fever dream of building Netflix clones with ChatGPT after 72 hours of coding. By stage four, our protagonist is planning an AI SaaS empire after a week of copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers. The final transformation into a complete skeleton represents the ultimate delusion: dropping engineering college for a bootcamp that "guarantees" job offers. Senior developers watching this evolution: *sips coffee in traumatized silence*

The industry keeps inventing new terms to sell the same old drag-and-drop builders. First it was "low-code/no-code" platforms promising to make developers obsolete. Now it's "vibe code" - same cheap knockoff but with a trendy rebrand. It's like putting a fedora on a WYSIWYG editor and calling it innovative. Meanwhile, actual developers are sitting back watching management fall for buzzwords that'll be abandoned faster than a Git repository after the startup funding dries up.

The classic "she's not interested" meme but with a web hosting twist. Browser works. Host works. But the moment Cloudflare enters the chat? ERROR . This is basically every web developer's dating life with Cloudflare as the clingy ex who shows up and ruins everything. Nothing like watching your perfectly functional site go down because Cloudflare decided today was a good day for a "Warsaw Error" — whatever the hell that even is. Ten bucks says someone tripped over a cable in their data center again.

THE DUALITY OF PYTHON DEVELOPMENT IS SENDING ME! 💀 Left side: Your virtual environment (.venv) containing 47 BILLION dependencies because apparently you need an entire library to convert a string to lowercase. Right side: Your actual source code (.src) that's basically three lines of code calling those monstrous packages to print "Hello World" with extra pizzazz. The absolute TRAGEDY of modern development - 99% dependencies, 1% original thought. Yet we have the AUDACITY to call ourselves "developers" when we're basically just professional package installers!

Five of these panels show the typical innovation S-curve where technology evolves from primitive (MS-DOS, Internet Explorer) to peak performance (Windows 95, Chrome). Then there's music... where we apparently peaked at Napster and it's been downhill ever since. The real innovation was clearly the ability to download entire discographies without paying a cent. Progress isn't always what corporate overlords want you to believe it is.