The Cookie Banner Conspiracy

Year 1: Everything is a crisis. Every bug is existential. You're debugging CSS at 2 AM wondering if you're cut out for this career while your tears blur the screen. Year not 1: npm install confetti and call it a day. Someone else will maintain it. Someone else will debug it. Someone else will cry about it. The circle of life continues. Experience teaches you the most valuable skill in software development: strategic apathy. Why reinvent the wheel when there's a package for that? Why stress about implementation details when Google exists and Stack Overflow has already solved your problem 47 times? You've evolved from "I must understand everything" to "does it work? ship it." The real wisdom is knowing that future you is technically "some other dev" too.

The perfect visualization of scope creep in web development! What starts as a cute little kid wanting a few technologies (MongoDB, Redis, Angular) turns into a database apocalypse. First frame: "I only need 5 requests per minute!" Second frame: "Just a few tables with hundreds of records!" By the final frame, this innocent project has transformed into a resource-devouring monster with Oracle, Hadoop, and every framework under the sun strapped to it, terrorizing the server playground while screaming "MAKE WAY LOSERS! I'M ABOUT TO PROCESS MY 5 USERS!" The irony of overengineering a solution that serves practically no one is just *chef's kiss*. It's that side project that started with "I'll just use a simple stack" and somehow ended up with Kubernetes.

Remember when we actually knew how to build websites? Now I've got a decade of experience but can't center a div without asking ChatGPT. The moment those AI servers go down, I'm reduced to a praying mantis in human form, desperately hoping my muscle memory kicks in for basic HTML tags. "What was that flexbox syntax again? Is it justify-content or align-items? LORD HELP ME."

Ah yes, the classic JavaScript journey transformation. You start those "30 Days of JavaScript" tutorials looking all innocent and hopeful, thinking you'll master the language in a month. Fast forward to day 30 and you're a deranged code demon with eye twitches and murderous thoughts every time you hear "undefined is not a function." The psychological damage of discovering that semicolons are sometimes optional but also sometimes catastrophic will do that to a person. JavaScript doesn't teach you coding—it teaches you creative profanity.

Nothing says "professional business relationship" quite like ransomware-ing your own client's website. Developer delivered the site, client ghosted on payment from "Joseph Smith Furniture," so now the site's held hostage with a polite little message: "If you need access, pay me." It's the freelancer's nuclear option—turning the entire website into a payment reminder. Technically genius, legally questionable, morally in a gray area the size of a production server. Sure beats sending invoice reminders that get ignored for six months. Pro tip: contracts with kill switches are great until you're explaining to a judge why you implemented your own version of "pay-per-view" on someone's business site. But hey, at least the services were delivered.

The eternal beginner's dilemma: choosing between the two most oversaturated tutorial projects in existence. Todo apps are basically the "Hello World" of CRUD operations, while weather apps are the "Hello World" of API calls. Both have been built approximately 47 million times by bootcamp graduates worldwide. The real pain here is that newbie devs genuinely stress over this choice like it's a life-altering decision, when in reality they'll end up building both anyway, abandoning them halfway through, and then starting a calculator app next week. The portfolio graveyard is real.