So You're A Web Dev

Crawling through the barren desert of job opportunities only to find two signs: one pointing to ".NET + WATER" just a quarter mile away, and the other to "NO .NET + NO WATER" 25 miles in the opposite direction. Some developers would literally dehydrate to death before touching C#. The desperation in that chat when they said "beggars can't be choosers" is the recruiter equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?" Survival instinct? Nope. Tech stack preferences? Absolutely.

Ah yes, the good old Weimar Republic approach to RAM pricing. At the rate we're going, you'll need a wheelbarrow full of cash just to afford 32GB of DDR6. Chrome alone will probably require 64GB minimum by then, and that's just for keeping two tabs open. The hardware manufacturers have figured out the perfect business model: make software bloat faster than Moore's Law can keep up, then charge exponentially more for the privilege of running Electron apps that could've been websites. Your wallet is already crying and 2026 hasn't even arrived yet.

When someone asks "what's a rectangle?", normal people just see a simple shape. Mathematicians bust out the formal definition with diagonals, breadth, and length measurements like they're preparing for a calculus final. And then there's us software engineers... two dots. That's it. Two points in a coordinate system and we've got ourselves a rectangle. Why waste time with fancy explanations when we can just define it with the bare minimum required to render something on screen? Seven years of education just to represent objects as efficiently as possible. This is what optimization looks like in the wild, folks.

The kid asks Santa for an OS built with HTML, and Santa's about to yeet them out the window. Classic misunderstanding of what an operating system actually is versus what HTML does. HTML is a markup language for structuring web content—it literally just tells browsers "hey, this is a heading, this is a paragraph, make this text bold." You can't build an OS with it any more than you could build a car engine out of Post-it notes. Building a real OS requires low-level languages like C, C++, or Rust, direct hardware interaction, memory management, process scheduling, and a whole lot of kernel-level wizardry. Meanwhile HTML is just sitting there like "I can make a div with rounded corners!" The gap between these two concepts is so vast that Santa's violent reaction is completely justified. Fun fact: Electron apps basically do wrap HTML/CSS/JS in what feels like a mini-OS footprint (looking at you, Slack and Discord eating 2GB of RAM), but that's still running on top of an actual operating system doing the heavy lifting.

You enter a perfectly valid password with letters and numbers, meeting all their ridiculous requirements. But wait—the form rejects it because you used "ineligible characters." The kicker? You need to use "half-width roman characters." For those lucky enough to have never encountered this nightmare: half-width vs full-width characters are a thing in Japanese and other East Asian text systems. Full-width characters take up more space (think ａ vs a). Some legacy systems or poorly designed forms throw a fit if you accidentally use the wrong width, even though they look nearly identical. Instead of, you know, just normalizing the input on the backend like a sane developer, they decided to make it YOUR problem. Because why make UX better when you can just confuse users with error messages that sound like they're written in ancient riddles? Classic enterprise move right there.

OH. MY. GOD. The BETRAYAL! 😱 Fresh-faced newbies turning their backs on centuries of programming tradition to chase after that flirty, seductive "vibe coding" with its pretty frameworks and no documentation! Meanwhile, traditional coding stands there UTTERLY DEVASTATED watching its relationship crumble before its eyes! The audacity! The drama! It's like watching your partner leave you for someone who doesn't even know what a pointer is but has really cool Instagram filters. And honestly? I can't even blame them - who wants to spend 5 hours debugging a segmentation fault when you could just npm install your problems away?