Coding 'From Scratch' vs. Coding 'In Scratch'
Description
This meme uses the 'Big Ben Affleck and Small Ben Affleck' format, featuring a full-sized, weary-looking Ben Affleck standing next to a miniature, equally weary version of himself. Both are dressed in blue shirts and dark pants. White text is overlaid on each figure. The text on the large Ben Affleck reads, 'Me who is coding everything from Scratch'. The text on the small Ben Affleck reads, 'My Kid who is coding everything in Scratch'. The humor is derived from a clever pun on the word 'Scratch'. For the experienced developer ('Me'), 'coding from scratch' means building an application without relying on external frameworks or libraries, a challenging and often exhausting endeavor. For the child, 'coding in Scratch' refers to using the block-based, visual programming language from MIT designed to teach coding concepts to beginners. The meme humorously contrasts the monumental effort of professional, low-level coding with the simplicity of a child's educational tool, while the shared expression of exhaustion hilariously unites the two vastly different experiences
Comments
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My kid's biggest bug is making a sprite walk backward. My biggest bug is a memory leak in a multithreaded C++ service. Somehow, we both have the same thousand-yard stare
I spent three sprints hand-rolling a task scheduler “from scratch,” my kid drag-dropped a Flappy Bird clone in Scratch before bedtime - turns out we’re both building from Scratch, mine just ships with pager duty and a 2 AM SEV-1
My kid's Scratch app handles concurrent users better than my hand-rolled event loop ever will, and their drag-and-drop state management doesn't require a 47-page design doc explaining why we're not using Redux
The irony is that the developer 'coding everything from scratch' is probably just reinventing poorly-tested versions of battle-hardened libraries, while the kid in Scratch is actually learning computational thinking, event-driven architecture, and parallel execution concepts that will serve them better than memorizing yet another framework's boilerplate. Plus, Scratch's visual programming model is closer to modern low-code platforms than most senior devs want to admit - turns out the real 'from scratch' was the technical debt we accumulated along the way
Me rewriting everything from scratch; my kid shipping everything in Scratch. Both greenfield projects - only his has a green flag and a demo
Kid's Scratch app: zero deps, deploys everywhere. My from-scratch monolith: 'Hold my artisanal wheel.'
Spent six months hand‑rolling an ORM, router, and logger; my kid hits the green flag and ships with better UX, fewer dependencies, and zero CVEs
Awwwww cuuuuuute Comment deleted
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