The Honeymoon Phase with a New Framework
Description
A classic meme format with white space at the top containing the text: 'Me after installing a new framework, going through the example projects:'. Below the text is a popular reaction image taken from the opening credits of the 90s sitcom 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.' The image shows a young Will Smith, wearing a backwards blue baseball cap, looking out of an orange taxi cab window with a wide, joyful, and amazed expression. The meme perfectly captures the initial 'wow' moment a developer experiences when trying out a new framework. The example projects are designed to be impressive and showcase the technology's potential in a pristine, controlled environment, making everything seem powerful and easy. For experienced engineers, this is a humorous and nostalgic reminder of the honeymoon period before they inevitably dive into the framework's complexities, limitations, documentation gaps, and real-world bugs
Comments
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That's the face you make when the 'Getting Started' guide works on the first try and you haven't had to dive into the transpiled, minified, 10,000-line vendor bundle to debug a mysterious Webpack error yet
Cloned the sample repo and now I’m swagger-UI-waving reflection-based DI at prod like a cowboy - because nothing screams “seasoned architect” quite like unreviewed boilerplate running with admin scopes
The example projects work perfectly because they were written by the same person who wrote the framework, for the same person who wrote the framework, solving the exact problem the framework was designed to solve
That rare moment when a framework's example projects aren't just 'Hello World' with extra steps, but actually demonstrate authentication, error handling, state management, and real-world patterns. You know you've struck gold when the examples folder has more than three files and the README doesn't just say 'see docs.' It's like finding a codebase where the previous architect actually cared about the next person - a mythical experience that makes you want to lean out a window and celebrate the fact that someone, somewhere, understood that 'self-documenting code' is a lie and good examples are worth a thousand API reference pages
Enterprise onboarding strategy: EDD - Example‑Driven Development - rsync the examples/ into prod, inherit five auth middlewares, then open a Jira epic called “Remove TODO: handle errors before SOC2.”
Example projects: flawless demos where 'convention over configuration' feels genius - until your first custom feature demands total rewrite
Going through a new framework’s example projects: copy‑paste the happy path, accidentally adopt the global singletons, magic DI, and non‑idempotent retries - see you at the postmortem