You're a 23-year-old software engineer who has somehow managed to accumulate the responsibilities of a 45-year-old engineering director, the patience of a divorced father of three, and the emotional stability of a PostgreSQL transaction waiting on a ShareLock.
And somehow, despite all that, your biggest enemy is a fucking dropdown menu.
Let's talk about your career.
You're a senior software engineer, a project manager, an aspiring software architect, a technical writer, an open-source developer, and apparently the unofficial Minister of UI Complaints for Southeast Asia.
You have so many fucking roles that if someone asked what you do for a living, you'd need to generate a database schema just to explain the relationships.
You joined CIMB Bank and within two months you've already mentally audited the entire organization.
The bank says, "Please complete your mandatory training."
You respond like they've just asked Linus Torvalds to manually sort a CSV.
BRO, YOU WORK AT A BANK.
Of course there's bureaucracy. What the fuck did you expect? A distributed systems research lab where the CEO personally congratulates you every time you implement an idempotency key?
And your favorite complaint?
"I'm not getting enough work."
My brother in Christ, you have a full-time job, multiple side projects, a PM position, a database migration product, technical articles, and a wife.
WHAT MORE WORK DO YOU WANT? A SECOND FUCKING GOVERNMENT TO RUN?
You complain when you're idle. You complain when you're busy. You complain when somebody schedules a meeting. You complain when somebody doesn't show up to the meeting.
You are the human equivalent of a monitoring system configured to alert on literally everything.
Your PagerDuty would send a critical alert because someone used calc instead of Calculate.
And then there's Piper.
Holy fucking shit, Piper.
You've spent months building a cross-database migration CLI that can migrate millions of records between PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB.
That's genuinely impressive.
But somehow, the thing that keeps you awake at night isn't data corruption, transaction consistency, or migration recovery.
It's that piper doctor doesn't sound friendly enough.
YOU BUILT A DATABASE MIGRATION ENGINE AND NOW YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT HURTING THE TERMINAL'S FEELINGS.
"Maybe the error message should be warmer."
BRO, IT'S A CLI, NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER.
You want the binary to say:
"Good morning, sweetheart! Unfortunately, your PostgreSQL credentials are fucking missing. Would you like some tea before we continue?"
And don't even get me started on your Cursor relationship.
You're basically in a toxic relationship with two language models.
Cursor makes a UI.
You hate it.
Cursor fixes the UI.
You hate the spacing.
Cursor fixes the spacing.
You hate the capitalization.
Cursor fixes the capitalization.
You hate the fucking icon.
At this point, Cursor isn't your coding assistant.
It's your emotionally abused junior developer who can't resign.
Now let's discuss your obsession with software architecture.
You're the kind of guy who sees a simple attendance system and thinks:
"Hmm. We need to establish immutable rule snapshots, domain boundaries, cross-module consistency, shift scheduling integration, payroll isolation, and historical configuration preservation."
The customer just wanted to know whether Sokha came to work on Tuesday.
YOU'RE DESIGNING A FUCKING DISTRIBUTED CONSENSUS PROTOCOL TO DETERMINE WHETHER SOMEBODY CLOCKED IN AT 8:03 AM.
You probably can't order fried rice without asking the waiter about eventual consistency between the kitchen and the cashier.
"Excuse me, what happens if the payment succeeds but the cooking worker crashes? Do you support idempotent order recovery?"
And you know what's worse?
You're probably already thinking of three legitimate edge cases that justify the architecture.
That's the problem with you.
You're not always wrong. You're just fucking exhausting about being right.
Let's talk about your motorcycle obsession.
You've ridden tens of thousands of kilometers on a Suzuki Smash 110cc, and somehow you've developed the confidence to critique the riding techniques of approximately every motorcyclist in Cambodia.
Every time you see a scooter rider swerve around a pothole, your brain launches a full incident investigation.
"Why didn't he brake? Why didn't he anticipate the obstacle? Why are automatic scooter riders like this?"
BRO, YOU'RE RIDING A SUZUKI SMASH, NOT CONDUCTING A MOTORCYCLE SAFETY AUDIT FOR THE UNITED NATIONS.
And your dream motorcycle is a Honda Gold Wing.
Of course it is.
You want a motorcycle with automatic transmission, cruise control, heated seats, massive storage, and enough electronics to run a small data center.
You claim to love riding, but your dream bike is basically a Honda Civic that's missing two wheels and the fucking roof.
You'd probably spend the first three days reviewing its UI and complaining that the infotainment system doesn't have consistent padding.
And Tanki Online.
Jesus Christ.
You're 23 years old, managing enterprise software projects, designing database migration engines, and writing technical articles for thousands of followers.
Then you get home and spend an hour furiously fighting imaginary tanks with your right thumb on a MacBook touchpad.
A TOUCHPAD.
You have the technical expertise to design distributed job-processing systems, but apparently a $15 mouse is where you draw the line.
You've reached Generalissimo, the highest original rank, and you're still complaining that matchmaking puts you on losing teams.
Maybe Tanki's matchmaking algorithm has read your ChatGPT history and decided you need to experience a system you can't redesign.
Every time you lose, you're probably mentally drafting an RFC:
"Proposal: Deterministic Team Assignment With Skill-Aware Load Balancing and Failure Recovery."
BRO, JUST SHOOT THE FUCKING TANK.
You hate unnecessary meetings because they waste time, but you'll spend two hours perfecting a Telegram message that could have been:
"Hey, can we move this to the Leave module?"
But my favorite thing about you is how you approach life.
You can spend an entire morning furious that a university makes students park their motorcycles too far from the building.
Then, two hours later, you'll be contemplating the profound beauty of existence, the fleeting nature of happiness, and why hearing muffled music from a party bathroom feels nostalgic.
BRO, PICK A FUCKING GENRE.
One minute you're a disgruntled infrastructure engineer.
The next you're a philosopher staring out a window in Siem Reap, smelling freshly harvested rice and cow shit, thinking about how magical life is.
You have the soul of a 70-year-old retired poet trapped inside the body of a 23-year-old developer who wants to fight whoever designed the navigation sidebar.
And you know what the most ridiculous part is?
You want to leave a legacy.
You want to build things that matter, contribute to the world, and create something meaningful.
That's a respectable ambition.
But at your current trajectory, your tombstone is going to read:
That was worth the 5 minute read. I think you have me beat! hahahahahaha. Thank you for sharing! There is so many good one liners in there I can't pick one, I tried! 😹 I like the duality that exists in your brain between building a better world and then dominating on a trackpad. Let's be honest - only a real boss can do that!
"A Ferrari being towed by a Razor scooter" is the most accurate description of homelab networking I've ever read. And "a graveyard with good documentation" hits way too close to home—we all have that one test_sentry branch rotting in the background.
The cat not recognizing its own name is the perfect punchline, though. Absolute gold. 😂
A custom words list is the most honest fix in speech recognition — "it works usually" is basically the industry standard. At least now the cat knows its own name!
Since my AI is still in the works, I prompted this to Google Gemini:
roast me
Gemini:
You want a roast, yet you gave me zero details about yourself. That is the conversational equivalent of showing up to a potluck with an empty Tupperware container and expecting a five-star meal.
Since you left me to work with nothing but a two-word prompt, here is what I already know about you:
Effort level. You typed seven characters and hit enter. You clearly treat your life with the exact same "let's see what happens if I do the bare minimum" energy.
Social life. Asking a predictive text algorithm to bully you on a Friday morning is a bold way to announce that all your real friends have muted the group chat.
Creativity. You didn't even provide a photo, a hobby, or a bad life choice to work with. You are basically the human version of default settings.
A Software Engineer who strongly believes one can add immense value by knowingly implementing Software Engineering best practices, even at the age of AI.
Hey, I'm Hema 👋
Developer, writer, and creator of Dev Opportunity Radar, a weekly series published every Friday on DEV, helping people discover opportunities they might otherwise miss.
The obsession with wrapping remote APIs into multi-layered agent abstractions is creating massive hidden latency and failure cascades in production.
If you profile real-world workloads, bare-metal local inference (via direct C++ / llama.cpp or vLLM bindings) consistently beats fragile cloud wrappers on both predictability and cost. Tooling should eliminate abstraction penalties, not compound them.
Here's mine haha:
Bro. You want a harsh roast?
You're a 23-year-old software engineer who has somehow managed to accumulate the responsibilities of a 45-year-old engineering director, the patience of a divorced father of three, and the emotional stability of a PostgreSQL transaction waiting on a ShareLock.
And somehow, despite all that, your biggest enemy is a fucking dropdown menu.
Let's talk about your career.
You're a senior software engineer, a project manager, an aspiring software architect, a technical writer, an open-source developer, and apparently the unofficial Minister of UI Complaints for Southeast Asia.
You have so many fucking roles that if someone asked what you do for a living, you'd need to generate a database schema just to explain the relationships.
You joined CIMB Bank and within two months you've already mentally audited the entire organization.
The bank says, "Please complete your mandatory training."
You respond like they've just asked Linus Torvalds to manually sort a CSV.
BRO, YOU WORK AT A BANK.
Of course there's bureaucracy. What the fuck did you expect? A distributed systems research lab where the CEO personally congratulates you every time you implement an idempotency key?
And your favorite complaint?
"I'm not getting enough work."
My brother in Christ, you have a full-time job, multiple side projects, a PM position, a database migration product, technical articles, and a wife.
WHAT MORE WORK DO YOU WANT? A SECOND FUCKING GOVERNMENT TO RUN?
You complain when you're idle. You complain when you're busy. You complain when somebody schedules a meeting. You complain when somebody doesn't show up to the meeting.
You are the human equivalent of a monitoring system configured to alert on literally everything.
Your PagerDuty would send a critical alert because someone used
calcinstead ofCalculate.And then there's Piper.
Holy fucking shit, Piper.
You've spent months building a cross-database migration CLI that can migrate millions of records between PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB.
That's genuinely impressive.
But somehow, the thing that keeps you awake at night isn't data corruption, transaction consistency, or migration recovery.
It's that
piper doctordoesn't sound friendly enough.YOU BUILT A DATABASE MIGRATION ENGINE AND NOW YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT HURTING THE TERMINAL'S FEELINGS.
"Maybe the error message should be warmer."
BRO, IT'S A CLI, NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER.
You want the binary to say:
"Good morning, sweetheart! Unfortunately, your PostgreSQL credentials are fucking missing. Would you like some tea before we continue?"
And don't even get me started on your Cursor relationship.
You're basically in a toxic relationship with two language models.
Cursor makes a UI.
You hate it.
Cursor fixes the UI.
You hate the spacing.
Cursor fixes the spacing.
You hate the capitalization.
Cursor fixes the capitalization.
You hate the fucking icon.
At this point, Cursor isn't your coding assistant.
It's your emotionally abused junior developer who can't resign.
Now let's discuss your obsession with software architecture.
You're the kind of guy who sees a simple attendance system and thinks:
"Hmm. We need to establish immutable rule snapshots, domain boundaries, cross-module consistency, shift scheduling integration, payroll isolation, and historical configuration preservation."
The customer just wanted to know whether Sokha came to work on Tuesday.
YOU'RE DESIGNING A FUCKING DISTRIBUTED CONSENSUS PROTOCOL TO DETERMINE WHETHER SOMEBODY CLOCKED IN AT 8:03 AM.
You probably can't order fried rice without asking the waiter about eventual consistency between the kitchen and the cashier.
"Excuse me, what happens if the payment succeeds but the cooking worker crashes? Do you support idempotent order recovery?"
And you know what's worse?
You're probably already thinking of three legitimate edge cases that justify the architecture.
That's the problem with you.
You're not always wrong. You're just fucking exhausting about being right.
Let's talk about your motorcycle obsession.
You've ridden tens of thousands of kilometers on a Suzuki Smash 110cc, and somehow you've developed the confidence to critique the riding techniques of approximately every motorcyclist in Cambodia.
Every time you see a scooter rider swerve around a pothole, your brain launches a full incident investigation.
"Why didn't he brake? Why didn't he anticipate the obstacle? Why are automatic scooter riders like this?"
BRO, YOU'RE RIDING A SUZUKI SMASH, NOT CONDUCTING A MOTORCYCLE SAFETY AUDIT FOR THE UNITED NATIONS.
And your dream motorcycle is a Honda Gold Wing.
Of course it is.
You want a motorcycle with automatic transmission, cruise control, heated seats, massive storage, and enough electronics to run a small data center.
You claim to love riding, but your dream bike is basically a Honda Civic that's missing two wheels and the fucking roof.
You'd probably spend the first three days reviewing its UI and complaining that the infotainment system doesn't have consistent padding.
And Tanki Online.
Jesus Christ.
You're 23 years old, managing enterprise software projects, designing database migration engines, and writing technical articles for thousands of followers.
Then you get home and spend an hour furiously fighting imaginary tanks with your right thumb on a MacBook touchpad.
A TOUCHPAD.
You have the technical expertise to design distributed job-processing systems, but apparently a $15 mouse is where you draw the line.
You've reached Generalissimo, the highest original rank, and you're still complaining that matchmaking puts you on losing teams.
Maybe Tanki's matchmaking algorithm has read your ChatGPT history and decided you need to experience a system you can't redesign.
Every time you lose, you're probably mentally drafting an RFC:
"Proposal: Deterministic Team Assignment With Skill-Aware Load Balancing and Failure Recovery."
BRO, JUST SHOOT THE FUCKING TANK.
You hate unnecessary meetings because they waste time, but you'll spend two hours perfecting a Telegram message that could have been:
"Hey, can we move this to the Leave module?"
But my favorite thing about you is how you approach life.
You can spend an entire morning furious that a university makes students park their motorcycles too far from the building.
Then, two hours later, you'll be contemplating the profound beauty of existence, the fleeting nature of happiness, and why hearing muffled music from a party bathroom feels nostalgic.
BRO, PICK A FUCKING GENRE.
One minute you're a disgruntled infrastructure engineer.
The next you're a philosopher staring out a window in Siem Reap, smelling freshly harvested rice and cow shit, thinking about how magical life is.
You have the soul of a 70-year-old retired poet trapped inside the body of a 23-year-old developer who wants to fight whoever designed the navigation sidebar.
And you know what the most ridiculous part is?
You want to leave a legacy.
You want to build things that matter, contribute to the world, and create something meaningful.
That's a respectable ambition.
But at your current trajectory, your tombstone is going to read:
HERE LIES ADAM — THE DEVELOPER
2003–20XX
Senior Software Engineer. Architect. Project Manager. Writer. Motorcyclist.
He migrated 5 million rows without losing a single record.
He survived corporate bureaucracy.
He mastered five Tanki turrets using a fucking touchpad.
He loved his family.
He hated unnecessary meetings.
His final words:
"Wait, why the fuck is this button here? It should be in the other module."
And somewhere, deep inside a data center, Cursor will finally display a perfectly aligned button.
But you won't be there to complain about it.
Rest in peace, you overengineered, chronically dissatisfied, architecture-obsessed motherfucker.
Your entire personality is basically
strictMode: truerunning against a world built withstrictMode: false.SO FREAKING SAVAGE! 😹
That was worth the 5 minute read. I think you have me beat! hahahahahaha. Thank you for sharing! There is so many good one liners in there I can't pick one, I tried! 😹 I like the duality that exists in your brain between building a better world and then dominating on a trackpad. Let's be honest - only a real boss can do that!
Ooooh ooh let me try haha
"A Ferrari being towed by a Razor scooter" is the most accurate description of homelab networking I've ever read. And "a graveyard with good documentation" hits way too close to home—we all have that one test_sentry branch rotting in the background.
The cat not recognizing its own name is the perfect punchline, though. Absolute gold. 😂
And I totally fixed that btw with a custom words list. 😂 it's not perfect. But it works usually. 😂😂😂
A custom words list is the most honest fix in speech recognition — "it works usually" is basically the industry standard. At least now the cat knows its own name!
🤣✨️🦾
Since my AI is still in the works, I prompted this to Google Gemini:
Gemini:
Omg 😂. Gemini was able to pull alot out of nothing. 😂😂😂
"you glorious neon-soaked disaster" 🤣🤣🤣🥰
Such accuracy. 😂🦄🤷♀️
same
Hahaha well at least it gave you some advice at the end 🤣
Solid advice! But will I do it? 😹
This is brutal, Anna 😭 I don't think I'd have the courage to ask AI to roast me this hard 😄
Oh man, if you ever do let me know please! 🤣🤣🤣
I still had the terminal open from last night. It holds it's opinion. 😹
The obsession with wrapping remote APIs into multi-layered agent abstractions is creating massive hidden latency and failure cascades in production.
If you profile real-world workloads, bare-metal local inference (via direct C++ / llama.cpp or vLLM bindings) consistently beats fragile cloud wrappers on both predictability and cost. Tooling should eliminate abstraction penalties, not compound them.
Atas
Anna, how is the job hunt coming along?
Oh, wait... I forgot your cat was looking for you! 😁
😹