Its Almost 2026

Ah, the funeral for uBlock Origin, scheduled for July 2025. Firefox is there pointing at the tombstone like "you seeing this?" while Chrome stands nearby looking suspiciously guilty. Google's plan to kill ad blockers with Manifest V3 is basically sending flowers to its own revenue stream. Firefox users just sitting here with popcorn watching Chrome users discover what the internet looks like without ad blocking. It's like watching someone experience pop-up ads for the first time since 2005.

You know that junior dev who just finished a React tutorial and suddenly thinks they're qualified to redesign your entire microservices architecture? That's what's happening here. The vibe coder—bless their heart—has wandered into a system design meeting armed with nothing but confidence and a Figma account. The architects are giving them that look. You know the one. The "please stop talking before you suggest we store everything in localStorage" look. System design meetings are where you discuss scalability, data flow, and whether your database will survive Black Friday traffic. It's not the place for "what if we just made it look cooler?" Stay in your lane, focus on those CSS animations, and let the backend folks argue about CAP theorem in peace.

That magical moment when you realize your 500-line monstrosity can be replaced by 20 elegant lines of code. The pure satisfaction of refactoring spaghetti into something that actually makes sense is practically orgasmic in programmer terms. Nothing beats that smug feeling of deleting more code than you write – it's like being paid to throw away garbage. Veteran devs know the best code is the code you don't have to maintain. Bonus points if you do it with a CSS array that somehow looks "beautiful" despite CSS being the digital equivalent of trying to nail jello to a wall.

The four stages of programmer self-image vs reality: Non-techies think we're hardware wizards fixing computers with screwdrivers. Parents imagine us as rocket scientist geniuses inventing the next NASA breakthrough. Meanwhile, we picture ourselves as brilliant algorithm architects solving complex mathematical problems that would make Einstein sweat. The brutal truth? We're just professional Googlers typing "How to use dates in JavaScript" for the 47th time this week because nobody—and I mean nobody —remembers that godforsaken API without looking it up.

Ah yes, the classic embroidery representation of web development! Frontend: a neat, organized pattern that looks presentable to visitors. Backend: the unholy tangle of threads that somehow makes everything work despite looking like a cat had a seizure while playing with yarn. The perfect metaphor for how we spend 80% of our time making sure the database doesn't implode while users complain that a button is 2 pixels off-center. The best part? Only other developers will ever see your backend spaghetti code, so as long as the frontend stays pretty, nobody needs to know you're secretly holding everything together with duct tape and Stack Overflow answers from 2013.

Ah, the classic marketing vs. reality divide. Developers know that what they built is just a simple counter algorithm that goes from 1 to 10, but marketing swoops in and suddenly it's "AI POWERED™" with a trademark symbol because god forbid we call things what they actually are. After 20 years in this industry, I've seen "revolutionary AI" that was just a bunch of if-statements wrapped in a fancy UI. The trademark symbol is the chef's kiss of bullshit – nothing says "we're pretending this is special" quite like a completely unnecessary ™.