What Does HTML Stand For

The GitHub portfolio paradox strikes again! What you're seeing is the classic "my GitHub is a disaster" syndrome where developers claim their repos showcase their skills, but the reality is a collection of bizarre, half-finished experiments that make absolutely no sense to anyone else. Those planes are the perfect metaphor - technically they're all aircraft, but some are missing wings, others are just engines, and one appears to be defying the laws of physics entirely. It's like having 47 repos with names like "test-thing2" and "new-project-FINAL-ACTUALLY-FINAL-v3" with exactly one commit from 2019.

The moment when JavaScript's existential truth bomb hits you like a freight train. In JS, arrays are just objects where the keys happen to be sequential numbers! That calm developer on the left is about to have their entire worldview shattered with this realization. It's that special kind of programming horror when you realize your mental model of a fundamental data structure was a comfortable lie. Next thing you know, you're trying myArray["1"] instead of myArray[1] just to prove to yourself that reality is broken. Welcome to JavaScript, where arrays are objects, undefined is not null, and NaN !== NaN. Sweet dreams!

The modern developer's secret weapon: copy-pasting AI-generated code without understanding a single line of it. Nothing says "senior engineer" like frantically Googling what your own code does when someone asks about it. The best part? That magical moment when you realize you've been confidently deploying code that you've essentially been taking dictation on. "It validates form data" is just fancy speak for "I have absolutely no idea what this eldritch horror does but it hasn't crashed production yet."

While everyone's out here having a full-blown brawl over React vs Vue, microservices vs monoliths, and whether tabs or spaces will end civilization, there's some guy peacefully eating his lunch while maintaining a COBOL system that's been running since before the internet had opinions. The real kicker? That COBOL dev is probably making bank because there are like 12 people left on Earth who know how to maintain those ancient mainframes that still process 95% of ATM transactions and credit card swaps. Banks literally can't afford to let these systems die, so they're stuck paying premium rates for developers who learned programming when punch cards were still a thing. Meanwhile, the "modern stack" crowd is too busy fighting about which JavaScript framework will be obsolete next Tuesday to notice they're reinventing the wheel for the 47th time this year. Job security? That COBOL dev has it in spades while the rest of us are one npm audit away from an existential crisis.

The MGM lion is the perfect mascot for web development. On the frontend, you've got this majestic, polished beast roaring confidently at users. Flip to the backend and it's just some poor exhausted dev sprawled across a table with their code running upside down and backwards. The backend is where dreams and clean architecture go to die, but hey—at least the users get to see a pretty lion! Ten years in the industry and I still can't tell if I'm the lion or the guy face-planted on the keyboard. Probably depends on the sprint.

The eternal bait-and-switch of programming life. You start a project thinking "I'll just use this simple framework" or "This should only take an afternoon," and suddenly it's 3 weeks later and you're deep in Stack Overflow threads from 2013 trying to figure out why your perfectly reasonable code is being interpreted as an arcane summoning ritual. The optimism-to-despair pipeline is the most reliable infrastructure in tech.