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Post #7273 · source on Telegram
Programmers Reuse Solutions from Smarter People and Feel Clever
Description
A two-panel meme using the Jimmy O. Yang 'You just insulted my entire race of people. But yes.' template. Top text reads: 'Oh you're a programmer? So your job is to find and reuse solutions created by people much smarter than you? And then feel clever for doing it?' The comedian responds: 'You just insulted my entire race of people.' followed by 'But yes.' The meme is made with mematic (watermark visible). It captures the uncomfortable truth that much of programming involves Stack Overflow, copy-pasting, and leveraging libraries written by others
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21Comment deleted
The entire npm ecosystem is just 2 million packages of people feeling clever about wrapping someone else's clever solution in a slightly different API
Senior engineering is just knowing *which* code from smarter people to reuse without also importing three conflicting logging frameworks and a 5-year-old left-pad dependency
Reuse isn’t cheating - it's just dynamic linking at career scale
The real 10x engineer isn't the one who writes 10x more code, but the one who finds the right npm package 10x faster and actually reads the documentation before opening 17 GitHub issues asking why their edge case doesn't work
Every senior engineer knows the secret: our job isn't writing code from scratch - it's knowing which battle-tested library to import, which Stack Overflow answer to adapt, and having the wisdom to recognize when someone smarter already solved this exact problem five years ago
It's called 'composition over inheritance' - or just 'npm install everything'
After two decades I’ve learned the job is 5% net‑new logic, 45% selecting the right Stack Overflow snippet, and 50% convincing semver that “minor” doesn’t mean “safe.”
Well, mankind has been living like that for eternity Comment deleted
My job is to stubbornly reinvent existing solutions because it makes me feel better about myself, making zero actual business logic progress in 5 weeks because all of the time was spent on figuring out how to write the most elegant HTTP call wrapper (it was not elegant). Comment deleted
no? that is not what I'm doing Comment deleted
Whatcha doin? Comment deleted
making a backend + API endpoint for a piece of software for certain educational institutions this: https://github.com/necodeIT/lb_planner_plugin/ Comment deleted
php 🤨 Comment deleted
believe me, php is the least of my problems in that codebase Comment deleted
i see a confirmation in the root directory already Comment deleted
ha ha very funny. I like kate, it's a non-problem for me Comment deleted
I too like Kate, I don't like people thinking if they could add any amount of features it wouldn't become NetBeans in the end. As for the conent of that file, it should be under gitignore since there's only the local environment setting. Comment deleted
no, it's part of the recommended setup (you don't need kate, but you do need this .kateproject for kate if you have the recommended setup) see readme. I think I've documented the setup by now Comment deleted
smart solutions are built to be used, don't let the time and brain power of someone else go to waste Comment deleted
(i have 4 huge projects that would cost the time remaining of my life if i attempted them) Comment deleted
My job is to create problems so I can fix them 2 months later and be told great job Comment deleted