Still In 2024: The Obstacle Course We Call The Internet

The eternal mountain climb of web development in four perfect panels: First, you think you're nearly at the summit with HTML. "Almost done!" you declare, blissfully unaware of what lies ahead. Then CSS enters the chat. "Almost!" you tell yourself, as your layout breaks for the 47th time because you forgot a semicolon somewhere. Bootstrap arrives like a superhero, and suddenly you're cruising. "Oh yes!" Life is good when someone else handles the responsive design nightmare. But then... the final boss appears: the unholy trinity of modern frontend frameworks. Vue, Angular, and React stare back at you, and your soul leaves your body as you realize you now need to learn state management, component lifecycle, and why your bundle size is 14MB for a simple todo app.

The expectation vs. reality of frontend development is perfectly captured in this Squid Game cookie comparison. You start thinking it's just drawing a simple triangle—clean lines, minimal effort. Then reality hits and suddenly you're meticulously carving a fractal nightmare of nested triangles where one wrong move breaks everything. Just like when your CSS looks perfect until someone opens it on a different browser and your beautiful design transforms into an eldritch horror. The only difference is that in Squid Game you die quickly; with frontend, you suffer for eternity trying to center a div.

The tech world's perfect standoff. Backend devs hide in their server rooms to avoid the horror of centering a div, while frontend folks break into cold sweats at the mere mention of a JOIN statement. The grass is always greener on the side where you don't have to learn the thing that makes you uncomfortable. Meanwhile, full-stack developers sit in the corner, twitching uncontrollably.

THE ABSOLUTE AUDACITY of Opera GX thinking they could just REMOVE a sacred fried egg image from their code! 💅 First they're like "we saved a WHOLE 18kb" as if that's something to brag about in our terabyte era. Then the ENTIRE INTERNET collectively loses its mind and demands justice for the egg that's been secretly lurking in their files since 2019! The fact that a browser had to publicly apologize to an EGG and then ceremoniously restore it to its rightful place is peak software development drama. This is why we can't have nice things... or smaller file sizes apparently!

The eternal cycle of developer hubris! First panel: "I'm gonna build this from scratch because libraries are for WEAKLINGS." Second panel: "Let me just quickly Google how to actually do this..." Third panel: *silent realization that this is way harder than expected* Fourth panel: *frantically copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers while questioning life choices* Nothing humbles you faster than attempting to reinvent the wheel only to discover the wheel requires calculus, physics, and three programming languages you don't know. And yet we keep doing it. Why? Because we're developers and pain is our love language.

The coding hierarchy of life, beautifully illustrated through Noah's Ark. At the top, we've got StackOverflow - the mighty elephant carrying us all. The giraffe reaching for those YouTube tutorials when all else fails. Meanwhile, documentation sits there like a wise old man nobody listens to. Then there's the middle tier: GitHub code (somewhat reliable), professor's code (theoretical at best), your friend's code (questionable but free), and your actual code (we don't talk about that). But when the client shows up? Suddenly that horrific amalgamation of duct tape and prayers you call "working code" becomes your prize exhibit. And the client, bless their heart, still asks "what the hell is this?" - as if they expected actual software engineering instead of the digital equivalent of a panic attack.