The Three Stages of Debugging
Debugging isn’t just a skill—it’s an emotional rollercoaster. Let’s break it down:
Stage 1: Denial 🤨
”It’s not my code. The API must be down.”
- You check the API. It’s fine.
- You check your database. Also fine.
- You check Stack Overflow. The top answer says: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
- You refuse to accept that the problem is… you.
Stage 2: Bargaining 😵💫
”Okay, if I fix this bug, I swear I’ll never push directly to production again.”
- You start randomly adding
console.log()everywhere. - Still doesn’t work?
- You add
console.log("WHY")and"HELPPPP". - Now your terminal looks like the Matrix, and you're still confused.
Stage 3: Surrender 🤦♂️
"Fine, I give up. Let me just undo my changes..."
- You remove all your "fixes."
- It magically starts working.
- You stare at your screen in silent horror.
- You push to production anyway and pray.
Common Developer Rituals 🧙♂️
| Ritual | Purpose | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Restarting VS Code | Summon the coding gods | 0% improvement |
| Copying code from Stack Overflow | Black magic | 50/50 chance of breaking everything |
Running npm install again |
Fake productivity | Still doesn’t work |
| Swearing at your PC | Emotional therapy | No effect, but feels good |
Things That Are Always Broken
✅ The "temporary" fix you pushed last year
✅ Your CSS on mobile
✅ The one bug you told your manager was "an easy fix"
✅ Your will to live after a merge conflict
Final Thoughts
If you’ve ever spent hours debugging only to find out you forgot a semicolon, welcome to the club. We meet every Thursday at 4:20 PM on Stack Overflow.
Top comments (15)
Yup
We're like
My code works, I have no idea why 😅
It doesn't work, don't know why 🤔🤨
Haha, exactly! 😂
I’m not a pro coder like you...
I'm not some pro coder.
Just a simple person 😅
Haha, same here! Just enjoying the journey. Keep coding! 😄💻
Semi-colon and Block letters 😂
The semicolon is like a ninja—silent but deadly when missing. 😂
Lolz... Sure, bro. They are really important, even when you think they’re not.
Just yesterday i got to know my backend app has shutdown for a whole day i didn't knew but glad i have log files. Relatable
Totally relatable! Logs are lifesavers in situations like this. At least you’ve got a trail to track what went wrong! 🚀
that's how it always starts. That's how it started for me. Without knowing what the stack overflow says and couldn't make sense of it. But once you went on the path to figure out what is what , you will know them all one day. One day, you will feel satisfied and want to share to the world about your discovery.
I think once I had a typo in the name of a variable used... as it happens... there was another variable defined by that same (and wrong) name... So, the code was perfectly compilable... It just didn't work :)
P.S. I like how I said there was another variable... - like it was added by somebody else, not me ;) But anyway, it sort of proves that it's alright-ish to make the same mistake an even number of times :)
Common Developer Rituals goes to Monday Mems!
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