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 enable 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 and slack that the pr came through all tests are passing with 469 lines of code removed and just one commit message that read optimize sub optimal 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 first up we've got the complexity Flex the world's greatest programmer once said in idiot admire's 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 forbuck making them think you're some kind of programming God the CTO who doesn't know how to code will be so impressed that you'll get a huge raise and that brings us to 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 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 all the level 1 flexors 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 I've actually been paying for it myself for years and it's well worth it if you value your time but another great way to demonstrate your Superior value is with the bimflex 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 now normally this is the point where I should make a joke about not being able to exit Vim but I've never really understood those jokes because I don't even know how to exit vs code but 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 that's pretty bowler 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 but nothing says I don't have a life better than 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 and 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 we're losing them we're losing he's dying now that one is kind of hard to pull off if you're a terrible programmer but that shouldn't hold you back from flexing anyway there's an old saying that goes something like those who can't code become influencers but what you do is pay your eight dollars to post on X formerly known as Twitter then make outrageous hot takes that nobody could possibly agree with if you give advice that so egregiously bad you might even get a reply from Elon Musk himself which you can then Flex about on your YouTube channel and yes that is a real tweet Elon and I are pretty much best friends at this point now you should never take technical advice from someone on Twitter or YouTube but instead only take it advice from people who Flex their past experience if you've ever worked at a Fan Company it gives you the privilege to start every sentence with as an ex-facebook engineer I recommend that you make X bad decision working at a fan company is like being in a special club that everyone wants to get into even though some people say they don't want to because their moral compass is too well calibrated but in reality they're just hating because they didn't grind on Lee code enough if I ever got a job at Fang I would tattoo it on my forehead if you're not in the club though another way to flex as a web developer is with your domains my GoDaddy account is more valuable than my Robinhood account domains aren't just for failed side projects they're Investments that you'll one day hand down to your grandkids like best Dash SEO Dash backlink-tool.net is a valuable asset that any developer would love to get their hands on the ultimate Flex a programmer can do though is learn to farm the programmer who blows up his computer and joins the Amish is Invincible to all the flexes we've looked at throughout this video as he milks his cow and tends to his crops his identity is no longer tied to these 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 ship 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