We Are HTML Developers

Behold the library scholar who created a single "Hello World" repository and suddenly transforms into an open source evangelist. Nothing screams "expert contributor" quite like pushing six lines of code that literally every programming tutorial starts with. It's the equivalent of making one grilled cheese sandwich and calling yourself a Michelin-star chef. The audacity is almost admirable - standing there with SpongeBob, preaching the gospel of collaboration while their entire coding portfolio consists of console.log("Hello World!") . The open source community trembles in anticipation of such revolutionary contributions.

Let's be honest - JSON is what happens when you give CSV a makeover and tell it to wear a suit to the interview. Sure, it's got fancy curly braces and proper nesting, but strip away the syntactic sugar and what do you have? The same damn tabular data with extra steps. Every frontend dev who's spent hours parsing nested JSON only to flatten it into a simple table for display knows that feeling of "why did we even bother?" Meanwhile, TOML and YAML are sitting in the corner wondering why JSON gets all the attention when they've been better options all along. The cat's reaction perfectly captures that moment when you realize your API could've just returned a simple CSV and saved everyone 40% of the bandwidth.

The truth bomb that launched a thousand uncomfortable laughs at a dev conference. Nothing says "modern web development" like creating 47MB of JavaScript dependencies to avoid writing display: flex; justify-content: center; . Meanwhile, the audience is divided between those nodding in agreement and those who just published their "Revolutionary CSS-in-JS Solution" on GitHub yesterday. The irony of someone presenting this while probably using a JS framework to power their slides is just *chef's kiss*.

This code is what happens when someone discovers nested ternary operators and thinks they've unlocked godmode. The developer is trying to add the correct suffix to a date (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) with a chain of ternaries that would make even Satan say "that's a bit excessive." The best part? It completely ignores 4-20, 24-30, and anything else ending with those numbers. Enjoy debugging this masterpiece when it breaks on the 4th of literally any month! Future maintainers will be adding this developer to their prayer lists tonight.

The modern developer's ark is a bizarre menagerie of code Frankenstein'd together from various sources. Up top, we've got the majestic AI tools (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) and the trusty GitHub repos we "borrow" from, plus those YouTube tutorials we frantically search at 2PM when nothing works. But when the client shows up? Suddenly we're presenting some unholy chimera of code that barely functions but somehow ships. The client's reaction is universal: "What the hell is this?" while we stand there pretending this abomination was our plan all along. The greatest skill in modern development isn't writing code—it's explaining why your code looks like it was written by five different people with conflicting goals... because it was.

Five years of professional coding experience and still googling how to center a div? Completely normal. The eternal impostor syndrome hits different in tech—where yesterday's expert is today's confused newbie thanks to some random framework update. You could be architecting complex systems by day and questioning if you even belong in the industry by night. The cognitive dissonance is just part of the job description they conveniently left out of the offer letter.