Why Your Tech Stack is Just Stockholm Syndrome With a README

Let’s not kid ourselves; your tech stack didn’t choose you, and you certainly didn’t pick it with a clear head. You were indoctrinated. Groomed. Conditioned by school, tutorials, job requirements, YouTube clickbait, and that one senior dev who swore by REACT.js like it was a religious text.

Why Stockholm Syndrome? Because it's the emotional bond you form with the tools that hurt you daily, but also pay your bills and make you feel competent just long enough to hit “Merge.”

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Me and .NET: A Love Story in a Hostage Situation

My go-to stack is .NET and C#.
Not because it runs everywhere (even though it kinda does now).
Not because it's modern and legacy at the same time, like some kind of enterprise cryptid.
Not because the tooling is slick, the docs are thorough, or because Visual Studio makes me feel like a functional adult.

No. I use .NET because I know it. I get it. It’s like that ex you keep texting even though you both know it’s over. Except in this case, you’re married, and your CI/CD pipeline is the kid you're staying together for.

I try to build everything with .NET: web apps, APIs, backend services, side projects, to-do lists, random JSON formatter utilities.

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Meanwhile, Python Devs Out Here Acting Like It’s the Second Coming

I’ve worked with Python long enough to develop a passive-aggressive relationship with indentationError. It’s not even the language that bothers me. It’s the cult of Python that thinks it’s the solution to literally everything.

• Web app? Flask.

• ML model? Jupyter notebook.

• API? FastAPI.

• Mobile app? Uh… crickets.

• That IKEA desk you still haven’t assembled? Someone probably tried to automate it with Python and a Raspberry Pi.

Look, I get it. You learned Python in school, where everything worked in magical Jupyter cells, and you didn’t have to think about the heap or memory or real-world production. You wrote “Hello, World,” imported pandas, and now think you’re ready to re-architect Twitter. Good luck, champ.

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Everyone Has That Language

Let’s be honest: we all try to fix everything with our language. Python kids treat it like duct tape. If you wrap enough of it around any problem, maybe it’ll hold. Me? I’m the guy showing up to a sinkhole with a roll of .NET and yelling “I got this!”

Neither of us is right. Neither of us is sane. We're just prisoners who’ve decorated our cells so nicely we think it's a studio apartment.

I remember a coworker at a previous job who wouldn’t shut up about Go. “It’s fast, it’s clean, it’s amazing for microservices,” he’d say. Like he was pitching me a startup instead of a programming language. Naturally, my first instinct was to dismiss him, because (a) I’m a .NET guy and (b) we all oversell our comfort zones like timeshare salesmen at Ocean City.

But then, at a different job, I actually had to use Go. And gosh darn it he was right. The syntax was tight, the tooling made sense, and it ran like a greased ferret. It didn’t replace .NET for me, but it did humble me. It’s easy to assume your stack is the sharpest knife in the drawer when you’ve never opened another drawer.

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The README Lies

Here’s the thing: every tech stack looks great in its README. Every GitHub project is like a dating profile with suspiciously good lighting and zero mention of crippling edge cases.

You see:

“Simple dependency injection!”
But in practice: 13 nested containers, a circular reference, and a runtime error that only happens when Mercury is in retrograde.

You see:

“Elegant syntax!”
But then one misplaced tab in Python sends your soul to the shadow realm (Land of Shadow for all Elden Ring players).

You see:

“Cross-platform!”
But then try to run it on Linux, and it’s like watching a dolphin try to drive a forklift.

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In Conclusion: You’re Not Free, You’re Just Familiar

Your tech stack isn’t your soulmate. It’s your emotional support war crime. It’s not the best option. It’s just the one you’ve suffered with the longest. The devil you know has autocomplete, and the devil you don’t requires reading documentation written by someone who last updated it during the Obama administration.

So go ahead, embrace your broken stack. Just don’t pretend it’s better. It’s just yours. And that, my friend, is what love looks like in the world of software.