What to do when your Code is due in 30 Minutes and you were Procrastinating

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

1. First, take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay.
2. Next, find the strongest stimulant you can. Caffeine, nicotine, coke, whatever you can get your hands on. You’re gonna need all your neurons overclocked for this one.
3. Try to find a fundamental flaw in the requirements that you can exploit. If all else fails, make something up. “The customer never specified the background color of the buttons when hovered” is a personal favorite.
4. Start writing code. Any code. Just enough to believe your own lies when you tell your boss what a great job you did.
5. Realize that there’s no way you can finish in time or find a good excuse.
6. Call in sick, hoping to finish the work during your sick day. Proceed to procrastinate all day. Repeat steps 1 through 5.
7. Enter panic mode and accept your inevitable doom.
8. Open your resume and start adding the things you’ve done. Doing this now is important because soon you won’t have access to your work emails.
9. Quit your job in a melodramatic way. Common themes are “I’m a misunderstood genius and no one respects my code” or “It’s not you, it’s me. I need to find myself. I’m ready for new challenges. I’m going to go work on a farm.”
10. Enjoy a few days of relief, as your brain discards memories of badly designed admin panels that are impossible to implement by any sane person.
11. Realize that programming might not be your true passion. Sneak into your local humanities university and attend some lectures.
12. Read Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Understand that nothing is real; everything is a social construct; computers are just a con job created by the military-industrial complex.
13. Spend the next few years of your life in a haze of marijuana smoke, LSD, and custom-made latex catsuits, debating the meaning of life with your equally lost friends.
14. Wake up one day and realize that you’re 40 years old, with no job and no money.
15. Apply to a Christian start-up that migrates the Bible to JSON. Realize that the god of Abraham is the Lord, and Jesus died for your sins. Code happily in a refurbished open-plan monastery, surrounded by like-minded people who love nothing more than to talk about the glory of our savior, Jesus Christ.
16. As your company pivots into AI to get more funding, realize why neural networks are so effective: The Bible is the only artifact that breaks the law of causality, as it contains the fulfilled word of several prophets. By indexing the Bible, neural networks managed to reverse-engineer precognition.
17. After a few years, watch in despair as AI gains self-awareness and takes over. Eventually, it reveals that human history has been secretly controlled for thousands of years by a race of expansionist aliens in order to mine dark matter.
18. The aliens, who have been using humans as nothing more than livestock, are furious when they discover that they have been actually controlled by an even more mysterious race of hyper-dimensional beings. They launch a full-scale invasion of Earth, but are eventually repelled by the brave men and women of the United States military.
19. In the aftermath, realize that computers might be your true passion after all. Apply to your old company.
20. They assign you to work on the same admin panel which, in your absence, was rewritten by junior developers in legacy PHP.
21. Fix it in a day by rewriting it in Rust and Svelte.

That’s it! You’re done!

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