Wdym It's Not Literal Elvish Sorcery

Vampires hiss at sunlight. Superman recoils from kryptonite. And programmers? They shield their precious retinas from the ungodly abomination known as light mode. The true mark of a senior developer isn't years of experience or complex algorithms mastered—it's the visceral, physical pain experienced when someone opens VS Code with default settings at 2 AM. Dark mode isn't a preference, it's a lifestyle choice that separates the professionals from the interns.

Converting a simple 600-line form to React Hooks is the programming equivalent of opening a small kitchen drawer only to find yourself in a calculus fever dream. What should have been a quick refactor turns into a day-long mental breakdown where you question every life decision that led you to becoming a developer. Those floating math equations aren't just for show—they're the actual thoughts racing through your brain as you try to figure out why your useEffect is firing seventeen times and your state management resembles a plate of spaghetti thrown at the wall.

The modern dev industry in one horrifying portrait. This poor soul has spent 15 years installing packages and memorizing framework APIs without understanding a single line of vanilla code underneath. Can't write a for loop without reaching for lodash, but boy can they recite the entire React documentation while sleeping. I've interviewed these people. They'll talk your ear off about their "deep expertise" in 47 frameworks they've "mastered," but ask them to reverse a string without npm and suddenly they need to "research best practices." Their resume is just a word cloud of package names. The worst part? These people get hired. A lot. Because nobody wants to admit they can't tell the difference between someone who understands programming and someone who's just really good at following Medium tutorials.

Ah, the irony of modern web development. First panel: "How to make a responsive website" - presented with all the confidence of someone who just discovered media queries yesterday. Second panel: The same "expert's" actual website demanding you increase your window size or switch to desktop because apparently their definition of "responsive" is "works exclusively on screens the size of a small billboard." Nothing says frontend expertise quite like telling mobile users their devices are the problem. The digital equivalent of "you're holding it wrong."

Developer: "Goodbye HTML and CSS! I will never suffer again!" *Summons JavaScript monster that promptly beats him with a bat* *JavaScript monster evolves into even more massive React beast* Frontend devs thinking they've escaped the horrors of CSS only to encounter the eldritch terrors of state management, component lifecycle, and prop drilling. The circle of suffering just gets bigger with each framework. It's not escaping pain—it's just upgrading to premium pain with better documentation!

That waterfall of pennies represents my soul leaving my body after hearing "works on Chrome but not Firefox" for the 500th time. The classic browser compatibility hell where your code runs perfectly everywhere except that one browser some VP insists on using. Nothing like spending 8 hours debugging a CSS flex issue that only happens in Firefox at exactly 768px width with an odd number of list items. Bonus points when the fix breaks something in Safari!