I’ve said this on reddit before, but once for a joke I tried to make a windows program to play doot.wav during October at random, and tried programming it on Linux.
Sinds playing audio and working with the system tray was tricky, I ended up with electron.
So yeah, an atrocious 120 mb application to play a 6kb wav file with a Math.random(). I don’t remember the memory consumption, but it was probably just as gross.
I too, tried using regex to strip html tags. This was in php with hardly any knowledge of oop.
A university education really improved me there, since they trained you in Java to a high degree within 20 weeks (alongside stuff like UML). PHP is a fine starter language, but as applications grow, a more native oop approach with build-time validation, really made me a better developer.