A Programmer’s Inferno — Circle Five:The Psychology of Distraction

Ez Eldeen M — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:34:40 +0000

14 years ago, I refused to build a fake progress bar for a Java Swing app.

Or even just count the downloaded update files and call that "progress."

It would have been easier. Faster. Less code.

But I didn't.

Because it felt wrong to deceive the user.

Today?

Skeleton loaders. Shimmer effects. Fake spinners.

All "best practices." All "UX improvements."

What I rejected for ethical reasons is now taught to beginners as "how to do it right."

This isn't progress. This is rock bottom.

📖 A Programmer's Inferno — Circle Five: The Psychology of Distraction

A Programmer’s Inferno

A Programmer’s Inferno: We Didn't Notice Software Rotting—Until It Was Too Late!

Ez Eldeen M — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:01:43 +0000

The software industry is in crisis, and we are responsible. We've traded architectural discipline for convenience, and engineering wisdom for bloat.

My series, "A Programmer's Inferno," is a descent into the circles of hell that define modern development. Here is the catalog of the first four circles:

Circle I: Architectural Collapse – How we build massive frameworks to solve simple problems, ensuring our systems are broken from day one.
Link: Architectural Collapse

Circle II: Dependency Hell – The culture that compels us to pull in thousands of unknown packages just to execute ten lines of code.
Link: Dependency Hell

Circle III: The Docker Absurdity – Masking software failures behind gigabytes of container overhead.
Link: The Docker Absurdity

Circle IV: Cloud Conspiracy & Jevons Paradox – Why the business model of cloud providers relies on our inefficiency.
Link: Cloud Conspiracy & Jevons Paradox

This isn't just about slow code. It's about planetary energy consumption, digital waste, and the loss of professionalism in our craft.

It's time to stop being "tool operators"—blindly assembling components we don't understand—and start being engineers again.

Circle Five: The Psychology of Distraction is coming next.

Which circle do you see most often in your daily work? Drop your worst "bloat" story in the comments.

DEV Community: Ez Eldeen M

A Programmer’s Inferno — Circle Five:The Psychology of Distraction

A Programmer’s Inferno: We Didn't Notice Software Rotting—Until It Was Too Late!