The Annual $12 Existential Crisis

The four stages of becoming a JavaScript developer: 1. Innocent excitement: "Ooh, a book about JavaScript!" 2. First encounter with callback hell: *uncontrollable sobbing* 3. Acceptance phase: *builds fortress of solitude with multiple monitors* 4. Final form: Bearded wisdom, thousand-yard stare, and a strong drink to numb the pain of yet another framework release. They grow up so fast when you feed them promises that never resolve.

Oh look, it's the classic VS Code experience - where your brain flips upside down trying to figure out what you're actually doing! The text being upside down is basically what happens to your mental state after staring at those fancy IntelliSense suggestions for 8 hours straight. Your code starts making sense, then suddenly you're writing gibberish that somehow still compiles. Marked as duplicate, closed by moderator.

Writing regex from scratch is basically a criminal offense in the developer world. It's like trying to defuse a bomb while blindfolded—sure, it might work, but the chances of creating an eldritch horror that matches everything except what you want are astronomically high. Even seasoned developers break out in cold sweats when faced with crafting regex patterns without the safety net of StackOverflow or regex101.com. The prison inmate's reaction is completely justified—this is the kind of reckless behavior that gets your pull requests rejected and your commit privileges revoked!

The eternal struggle of tech evolution: that moment when a new framework/language drops and suddenly everyone's talking about it like it's been around forever. Meanwhile, you're sitting there wondering if "vibe coding" is some revolutionary paradigm that will make your code emit positive energy, or just another JavaScript library that'll be obsolete by Tuesday. The fear is real. Ask about it and expose yourself as a tech dinosaur? Or nod knowingly while frantically Googling under the table? We've all been there—silently adding it to the mountain of tech debt in our brains while hoping no one asks us to implement it in the next sprint.

Nothing kills the coding flow state quite like a surprise standup with the CEO. One minute you're blissfully wrestling with AngularJS dependencies, finally getting that service to inject properly, and the next you're frantically trying to remember what you actually accomplished yesterday besides "investigating solutions" (aka Stack Overflow rabbit holes). The sheer panic of having to translate "I spent 6 hours fixing a bug caused by a missing semicolon" into corporate speak while the CEO watches is the true horror of modern development. Bonus anxiety points if you've been secretly refactoring the codebase because whoever wrote it originally should be banned from touching a keyboard.

The AUDACITY of reality! Top panel: You, blissfully cuddling with adorable Udemy tutorials that whisper sweet nothings like "become a full-stack developer in 12 hours!" Bottom panel: Your soul being VIOLENTLY MAULED by the bear of actual workplace expectations where suddenly you need to understand legacy code written by seven different developers who all HATED each other! That cute little tutorial didn't prepare you for the bloodbath that is production debugging, did it sweetie? 💅