How to Flex on Other Developers: A Guide

Many years ago in a story I just made up, I was architecting some highly scalable infrastructure when a staff engineer walked into my cubicle and said, “hey buddy, that’s a cute VS code theme you’ve got there.” “Oh thanks, it’s a synthwave with power mode enabled,” I replied. Before I could explain more, though, he cut me off and said, “you see that bug on line 234, right?” I said, “no, that’s impossible, sir. We have 100% test coverage on this code.” Well, I’m gonna pull it up in neovim on my Arch desktop and uh, I’ll send you a PR for that.”

Five minutes later, I get a notification in Slack that the PR came through. All tests are passing, with 469 lines of code removed and just one commit message that read “optimize suboptimal code.” I then looked out the window and saw him driving away in his Tesla. It was at that moment that I realized I had been flexed upon.

If you’re a programmer who’s feeling down, one of the best ways to boost your ego is to flex on other developers. For programmers, there’s only two states of being: imposter syndrome or superiority complex. In today’s video, you’ll learn how to become the best programmer the world has ever seen in your own mind, by looking at 10 practical ways to flex on your friends and colleagues.

The Complexity Flex

The world’s greatest programmer once said, “an idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity.” Luckily, most people are not geniuses. Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that. So, what you can do is take something simple, like a perfectly functional JavaScript function, then add TypeScript to it while preaching the virtues of end-to-end type safety. From there, refactor it into an abstract factory, singleton, adapter, decorator, proxy, and when nobody understands that, just tell them they’ve never seen clean code before and should have read the “Gang of Four” book, making them think you’re some kind of programming God.

The Money Flex

The amount of money you make is exactly tied to the amount of value that you bring to the world. The level one money flex is the junior developer making 50k a year who shows off to his old colleagues at Arby’s who are only making 45k a year. The dude in the cubicle next to him, though, did a better job negotiating a salary and makes 225k a year. That dude’s got a cousin, though, who works at Netflix, who flexes on him for making 900k a year. That dude’s landlord, though, was one of the first engineers at Uber, who has a net worth of 25 mil, who now flexes on social media about being a genius technology investor. But then he gets flexed on by the billionaire crypto bro who made all his money by rug pulling. The circle of life is truly beautiful.

If you subscribe to the link in this post, I may get a commission. I’m not quite a billionaire yet, so the way I like to flex is by owning YouTube premium. As a lazy developer, I’m obsessed with optimizing my time, and by owning premium, I don’t have to watch ads on any YouTube videos and I can download all the JavaScript tutorials I want to watch offline when I travel. On top of that, it provides access to YouTube music, so I can listen to Huey Lewis in the News on repeat while I code, which actually saves me money because I don’t need to pay for other music streaming services. What’s really awesome, though, is that YouTube has allowed me to offer you one month of YouTube premium for free.

The Vim Flex

When you use Vim, it elevates you to a higher plane of consciousness, where you can look down upon the poor lost souls using tools like VS code, IntelliJ, and Emacs. If you’re the real deal, you won’t even have a mouse at your computer. An even more potent flex is your operating system. If you want to tell people you’re rich, go with a Macintosh and combine it with the Apple Vision Pro to also tell people that you’re a clown. Real developers, though, use Linux. You can impress most people by simply using Ubuntu, but if you really want to impress people, you should pay a bunch of money to IBM to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

But eventually, you’ll find yourself alone at a urinal. A man will walk in, he’ll turn his head and look at you, then say these three words, “I use Arch, by the way.” You’ll immediately feel smaller, like your distro is just not as well endowed as you thought. Not to worry, though. You’re just getting flexed on by someone who doesn’t have a life, who can spend countless hours configuring their OS. Everybody knows that the ultimate distro is Windows because that tells people that you actually have a life, and maybe even a girlfriend outside of programming.

The GitHub Flex

If you don’t have a GitHub commit history that looks like this, then you’re not a real programmer and you don’t care about open source. Your profile should have enough awards and badges on it to make you look like a North Korean General. You can achieve these badges by flexing on other open source projects. The chainsaw PR flex is a great way to show the world that you’re the top G of JavaScript. What you want to do is find new small projects from young, enthusiastic developers, then fork their code and remove every line possible while making sure that all the tests still pass, then send a vague pull request explaining how you cleaned up the code to use best practices. If you did it properly, the project will soon be abandoned because no programmer can face that amount of flexing.

The Farming Flex

The programmer who blows up his computer and joins the Amish is invincible to all the flexes we’ve looked at throughout this article. As he milks his cow and tends to his crops, his identity is no longer tied to superficial things like code quality, GitHub stars, likes, followers, and even money. As he looks at the spiderweb reflecting the sun, it reminds him of a silicon chip. He recognizes the inherent intelligence that permeates all of nature. Its beauty is so overwhelming that he begins to cry. In that moment, he’s connected to all the people that lived and died before him. Soon enough, he’ll be dead and forgotten, just like them. The complete insignificance of his own existence is both terrifying and liberating. And it was at that moment that he realized that the spider was just flexing on him.