The Cookie Banner Conspiracy

The evolution of data collection in three acts of increasing desperation. First, you've got your fancy waiters (API) - clean, professional, brings exactly what you ordered. Then there's the pirates (scraping) - stealing what you need because the restaurant won't serve you. And finally, the undead hordes (archive.md) - the nuclear option when a site has died but you still need that precious data. It's the developer's journey from "I'd like to make a request" to "I'm breaking into your house at 2am with bolt cutters."

Thinking about learning JavaScript: PANIK . Seeing the $29.217 yearly salary: KALM . Discovering that JavaScript thinks 0 > null is false, but 0 >= null is true: EXTREME PANIK . JavaScript's type coercion is like that friend who makes up rules during board games. "No, see, zero is equal to null when it's convenient, but also completely different when it's not. Why? Because I said so."

Ah, the classic "career path" in tech—where senior devs push juniors off cliffs with nothing but a cheerful "You can do it!" and some links to Stack Overflow answers from 2011. The gap between "here's your promotion" and "here's some tutorials" is approximately the same as the gap between your confidence during the job interview and your first day actually writing production code. Nothing says "mentorship" quite like watching someone crash spectacularly into reality while you shout documentation links from a safe distance. Welcome to software development, where we don't have onboarding—we have gravity.

Ah, the infamous "leftpad incident" – when the entire JavaScript ecosystem collapsed because someone got mad about a package name. 11 lines of code that could've been written by a junior dev in 5 minutes brought down Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify. Why? Because the modern web is basically a house of cards built on thousands of dependencies that nobody actually reads. This is why I drink. The most powerful companies in the world, with billions in market cap, were paralyzed because they couldn't figure out how to pad a string with spaces without importing a package. NPM: Need Package Madness. Where we'll happily import 700MB of node_modules to avoid writing a for loop.

The existential crisis of password management in its purest form. First, you can't remember your password. Then when you try to create a new one, the system hits you with that classic security measure preventing you from reusing old passwords—which is technically correct since you just failed to enter it twice! The wrapped-up cat of despair perfectly captures that moment when you realize you're trapped in authentication purgatory. It's that special kind of digital suffering that makes you question your life choices and wonder if maybe you should've just written everything down on a sticky note like your grandparents.

Left panel: A shooter with perfect form, deadly precision, and an arsenal of modern frontend frameworks and tools that have revolutionized web development over the last decade. Right panel: The guy who still uses jQuery in 2024 and somehow keeps hitting the target anyway. The web development equivalent of bringing a musket to a laser gun fight and still managing to take down the enemy. Respect.