From 0 Likes to Meme Engineer
We have all been there. You are sitting at your desk late at night, your code is throwing errors that...
We have all been there. You are sitting at your desk late at night, your code is throwing errors that make absolutely no sense, your terminal is practically screaming at you, and you are questioning every single life choice that led you to a career in tech. Then, you open your feed and see a meme about merge conflicts or missing semicolons. Suddenly, you do not feel so alone anymore. The pain dissipates, replaced by the comforting realization that thousands of other developers are suffering through the exact same bugs.
If you love memes, especially the ones related to tech that are super relatable, and you feel like the meme shares the exact pain you have felt all along, then congratulations! You are officially a memeholic. Welcome to the club.
The Quest for the Missing Humor
When I first started using LinkedIn, I was thoroughly bored with seeing everyone sharing their massive wins, their promotions, and their flawless achievements. Meanwhile, there I was, struggling just to make it through my daily tasks and looking for a way to survive the week. It felt like walking into a party where everyone is wearing a tuxedo and you accidentally showed up in your pajamas.
That was the time I decided I needed a shift. I started posting about my 30 day LinkedIn challenge where I planned to share my learnings of the day for the next 30 days straight. To be completely honest, I was not able to complete it. My streak broke faster than a production server during a Friday afternoon deployment. However, I still got the push I desperately needed to use LinkedIn as my own personal page where everyone can see what I am actually doing.
But even with the challenge, my LinkedIn profile was missing something crucial. The natural humor in me was nowhere to be found on that incredibly serious, corporate platform. I wanted a genuine way to let out my frustration while vibe coding or working with AI tools in general. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could connect with a few developers and have a real chat centered around humor. That is exactly where I started learning the art of the craft and posting memes.
The Initial Matches and Reality Checks
I still remember the very first meme I ever posted. It was not hilarious by any stretch of the imagination, mostly because I simply did not know how to make them yet. I randomly posted a template, thought to myself that it was quite funny, and hit publish.
The result? I barely got any likes. Reality hit quickly, and I realized it just was not that funny.
Then, I came to know about the famous Meme Monday trend right here on Dev, where @ben posts funny memes every single Monday. I was incredibly nervous and excited at the same time. I decided to gather my courage and posted a meme on the thread. I genuinely felt it was hilarious, and this time, Ben actually reacted and commented!
Buoyed by that small victory, I found out about a JavaScript group on LinkedIn that posts memes and knowledge posts. I confidently thought to myself, "Am I finally funny?" I posted a creation to that group, eagerly refreshed my feed, and ended up with a grand total of two likes. Reality hit me hard all over again. I was definitively not funny.
But I refused to give up just yet. I kept creating and making memes for Meme Monday, while taking the time to look at everyone else's contributions, which I truly enjoyed. Soon after, I thought about posting a meme specifically for April Fool's Day.
I told myself I absolutely had to be funny that day. I posted the meme, and I finally crossed my very first major milestone: 100 likes on a single post!
I was so incredibly happy. I felt validated, thinking that I am finally funny after all. It was the biggest moment for me to achieve 100 likes. I thought, "Now is the moment. I am an absolute meme making machine!"
Naturally, the universe decided to humble me immediately. After posting my next creation, I got a whopping two likes and walked right back to square one.
Through that roller coaster, I realized an important rule: the more relatable a meme is, the more people will like it. If the problem I am facing is something someone else is actively dealing with, and I can create a piece of content that successfully sells that shared frustration, it will hit the mark. I also had to accept that I am not the only one trying to be funny on the internet. There are tons of creators out there who are vastly funnier than me. I watched other accounts pull in 1000 or even 10000 likes. It did not disappoint me, though. Instead, it encouraged me to reach that elite level someday, and I am trying my best every day to build highly relatable tech jokes.
My First Major Breakthrough
When the idea for this specific meme popped into my head, I was amazed by how relatable it felt. I poured all of my technical frustration with AI into this image. You know the exact feeling: always being forced to be super nice to the AI assistant even after it makes a massive mistake, or reading the AI say "sorry" tons of times after it completely fails to understand your crystal clear instructions.
I posted it with very low expectations, thinking it would suffer the same fate as my other posts getting three or four likes before disappearing into oblivion.
But boy, oh boy, I was so wrong.
It completely blew up for me. The post gathered 572 likes and 14 reposts. I was utterly amazed watching everyone interact with it, but later I truly understood the sheer depth and relatability of the joke. Every developer using AI was dealing with that exact passive aggressive loop.
After it blew up, I felt a wave of happiness that felt like receiving an official offer letter from my dream job. Every two minutes, my phone was buzzing. Someone liked it, then again, and then again. Having my phone buzz continuously due to a LinkedIn notification was a truly brand new experience for me, especially since my regular posts barely ever crossed 20 or 30 likes. Once it crossed the 500 mark, I thought, "I have officially cracked the game. I am a master engineer now. Every single meme I make from here on out will easily get 500 to 1000 likes."
Spoiler alert: it did not go as expected.
The Inevitable Dip
I was highly excited to launch my next potentially viral creation. I truly believed it would break the record of the previous one, work absolute wonders, and cement my status so I could proudly call myself a true Meme Engineer: an engineer who simply loves making people laugh.
But boy, I was so wrong again.
I posted it and eagerly waited for the approval of the internet the next day. As soon as I woke up, I checked the metrics, wondering if it was sitting at 100 or 200 likes already. Can you guess how many it actually got? Three. Three likes at maximum.
I was completely devastated. I wanted to quit making them altogether and just focus strictly on my traditional technical learning. But the process of creating content gives me a unique sense of relief, the exact kind of satisfying feeling you get right after successfully pushing clean code to production without breaking anything.
With that renewed motivation, I posted another one, thinking this new direction would surely perform well. Take another guess at how many likes I received this time.
Zero. Yes, a big fat zero.
I was entirely heartbroken. I had taken the inspiration, learned the trends, tried to improvise to make it the absolute best it could be, and what I got in return was nothing. Do you think I should have quit right then and there?
The Continuous Grind
Despite the heartbreak, I kept grinding. Through the failures, I discovered a small, reliable pattern: if a meme can genuinely make me laugh out loud right after I finish creating it, it has a high chance of making someone else laugh too. I started creating content based strictly on that baseline rule.
I put together a new meme that genuinely made me laugh from the heart. I pushed it live, waited for the internet's approval, and went to sleep. The next morning, when I checked my phone, it had sailed past 100 likes. Just like that, I got a fresh wave of confidence that, yes, I can finally do this right and bring a smile to someone's face.
I immediately went into a full sprint in this mode. I kept creating, ensuring that if I could laugh at the draft, it was ready for production.
My next major post also pushed well past 100 likes, and I finally felt like I had cracked the secret source code to becoming a functional Meme Engineer. Of course, there were still a few hits and misses along the way, but I learned my lesson to keep grinding again and again, treating every single failed post as a debugging lesson for the next one.
The Ultimate Payoff
Eventually, I published my next creation as part of my routine schedule, thinking we would just wait and see how it performs. I had intentionally set the bar incredibly low for myself by this point. I decided that even getting 10 or 20 likes on my work was more than enough proof that I was making good stuff.
But life had completely different plans for me. This specific meme went on to hit the exact same 500 plus likes mark as my first viral hit! I was deeply happy and excited because complete strangers on the internet were finding my sense of humor genuinely funny. It gave me the ultimate confidence boost to keep the grind alive. There will always be hits and misses in this field, but the real joy is in the continuous learning.
This journey has been a wild ride, and I can honestly say I have never had so much fun creating content. At the end of the day, whether we are building software or building jokes, we are all just trying to connect through our shared experiences in this wild tech ecosystem.
Thank you so much for reading through my story! Sharing these milestones with the Dev.to community is incredibly rewarding to me. Now, I want to turn the mic over to you. If you consider yourself a bit of a Meme Engineer, or if you just have a favorite joke that perfectly sums up your working life, do share your favorite memes down in the comments below! Let us turn the comment section into the ultimate humor repository.
If you want to stay in touch, swap funny deployment horror stories, or chat about vibe coding and AI workflows, feel free to connect with me over on LinkedIn. Let us keep collaborating, sharing the daily grind, and debugging our way through life together!
