The Browser Extension Vigilantes

Nothing triggers a real senior dev quite like seeing some fresh-faced 21-year-old on Instagram claiming "Senior Developer" in their bio. Kid probably just finished their bootcamp last Tuesday and suddenly they're out here acting like they've survived production incidents at 3 AM, dealt with legacy code from 2003, or had to explain to management why "just make it work like Facebook" isn't a valid requirement. Senior isn't just about knowing React hooks or writing clean code. It's about the battle scars—the time you accidentally dropped the production database, the merge conflicts that made you question your career choices, the technical debt you inherited from three developers ago who all quit. You earn that title through years of pain, not by watching YouTube tutorials and calling yourself a "10x engineer." But hey, LinkedIn influencer culture has everyone speedrunning their careers these days. Next thing you know, teenagers will be listing "CTO" because they deployed a Next.js app to Vercel.

While Vim zealots and VS Code fanboys are busy screaming at each other with tears streaming down their faces, the true gigachad silently opens Notepad and gets the job done without spending 3 hours configuring plugins. Sure, it's like performing surgery with a butter knife, but sometimes you just need to edit a damn config file without your computer throwing a tantrum. The real flex isn't your fancy IDE—it's shipping code while everyone else is still arguing about tab width.

Ever wondered what actually powers the internet? Turns out it's a magnificent Jenga tower of questionable engineering decisions! From the foundation of electricity (thanks Linus Torvalds and... IBM?) to C developers crafting dynamic arrays with the precision of a caffeinated squirrel. The entire stack balances precariously on unpaid open-source devs while web developers actively sabotage themselves at the top. Meanwhile, Rust devs are just vibing in their own corner with their memory-safe rocket, and whatever Microsoft is doing with that angry bird is probably best left unexamined. My favorite part? Nuclear waste apparently converts to "cookies for fish." The perfect metaphor for legacy code - dangerous, incomprehensible, yet somehow still functional!

CSS: the only language where you can have 15 years of experience and still Google "how to center a div" every single time. The emotional journey here is accurate—starts with optimism, brief moment of false confidence when something actually works, then back to questioning your entire career choice when padding decides to behave differently in Chrome vs Firefox. Some say there are senior CSS developers out there. I've never met one. We're all just pretending and hoping flexbox doesn't betray us today.

Government agencies finally entering the digital age but making the worst possible tech choices? *Chef's kiss* Nothing says "we hired consultants from 2003" quite like rejecting clean, lightweight JSON in favor of bloated XML files that require a PhD to parse. The kind of decision that makes developers contemplate career changes to literally anything else. Fun fact: Some government systems still use COBOL, a language older than the moon landing. At this rate, they'll discover JSON around the same time we colonize Mars.

When you've been coding in dark mode for 8 straight hours and some website designer thinks #FFFFFF is an acceptable background color. My retinas are literally burning through these protective goggles. Pro tip: filter: invert(1) in your browser's dev tools is basically emergency eye surgery for these situations.