As an undergraduate, I wondered how it was possible to write code professionally, because I could only barely fit the semester-long programming assignment in my head. When I asked my professor about it, I got an independent study credit to learn about UML.

UML (as a representative example of thoughtful documentation) is a partial answer. But actually a much larger part is that with practice I can hold a lot more code in my head. Today, that semester project seems trivial and if I see a stack trace I can tell you how to fix the bug that caused that exception to get thrown.

As a senior dev, I’d answer “how do you remember what your code does?” with

1. As you work, you get better at just remembering
2. As you find patterns and follow them, you’ll have less to remember (I bet I know what the downloadUnpackUpdate() method does!)
3. As you do the first two, you’ll learn to recognize when comments are helpful

When Democrats are in power, the Republicans can stall things because they only have a slim majority and the extreme measures that they’d need to take are unpalatable to 5-30 of the most regressive Democrats. So their majority doesn’t count for a lot.

Overall, I think this is partially just that Americans are pretty regressive (possibly because of all the propaganda, possibly because of our poor education). And partially the successful efforts by Republicans to control local government, which allows them to do things like gerrymander federal districts.

Dead plants from before there were decomposers who could properly devour the corpses. Oil is lich-ferns

Weirdly, I haven’t seen a lot of people who think The Gang in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are cool role models. I guess the difference might be that Rick is canonically a genius where The Gang are canonically morons.

So: at least 4 years, probably longer :/