DEV Community

Cover image for What's your biggest nightmare as a developer?

What's your biggest nightmare as a developer?

Shrijal Acharya on December 25, 2023

Hey, dev's 👋 As a developer, you might have faced many challenges and frustrations in your projects. But what is the worst thing that could happen...
Collapse
 
mistval profile image
Randall

I work in crypto and people constantly try to hack us. So my biggest fear is authoring a bug that leads to bajillions of dollars in theft! Of course, that sort of thing is never one person's sole fault, since we have code reviews, QA, security audits, etc, and security is the responsibility of the organization as a whole. Still, I'd sure hate to be the one who opened the file and typed in the bug.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

I get it! It's scary to think about making a mistake in crypto code that could lead to a lot of money being stolen. I think that is a valid nightmare for most developers, especially in the crypto space. Keep being careful!

Collapse
 
bbkr profile image
Paweł bbkr Pabian

Same fear can be present if company is dealing with a lot of personal information. Leak can lead to avalanche of personal lawsuits. On top of that in EU penalty for data leak can be as high as 20 000 000 EUR or 4% worldwide company turnover.

Collapse
 
bsmartt13 profile image
billy the kid

hold on a second, are you guys talking about cryptology or cryptocurrency? Does that go without saying these days, am I becoming an old fart?

Please keep in mind I know nothing about you @mistval both personally and professionally, but If nothing else i gotta say i love that you are self-conscious enough to not only know your own limits as a developer - not be afraid to lay your cards on the table, it takes a degree of humbleness to do that and it's the one quality I find indispensable amongst whom I chose to work with. It can be really dangerous when people are both responsible for owning some code or infrastructure, and insecure about the requisite skills and expertise it takes to do that competently. Kudos to you!

Collapse
 
mistval profile image
Randall

Thank you Billy for your kind words :) It's crypto as in cryptocurrency. I should have said I work in "blockchain", that would be less ambiguous!

Collapse
 
nombrekeff profile image
Keff

Haha working in crypto is already a nightmare without that responsibility 😂 I've been there, but stopped cause I hate crypto

Collapse
 
nombrekeff profile image
Keff

Monotony tbh. There's nothing more boring and draining than a monotone development job (for me at least). No challenges and no change is a recipe for burnout and nightmares. The idea of doing the same work over and over again for an undetermined amount of time fucking scares the shit out of me.

This was the reason I had to stop working earlier this year to take a break. I left in April and still haven't considered looking for another job.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Absolutely! It's essential to find fulfillment in your work. Take the time you need to explore opportunities.

Collapse
 
canro91 profile image
Cesar Aguirre

That's true! Being there and done that!

Collapse
 
pixelrella profile image
Pixelrella

Same here! I usually switch jobs after some time, simply because I just get too bored of the tasks I am supposed to do.

In a new job, there are new tools and different approaches to learn, at least xD.

I also start a lot of different initiatives like refactoring code for optimization or readability, some UX improvements, or building the developer knowledge base. When that get's boring. I'll try to see if I could be engaged with other tasks or tools, looking for holes in the process.

That approach of course depends on how freely you can assign your time, though. If all your time is constantly planned for some super important stuff that needs to go out by yesterday, you don't get to do fun stuff at work. And this also depends on your interest/motivation/will to start initiatives at work.

I also try out and combine different roles. I switched from backend developer, to full stack, to Unity developer, back to backend, a bit of systems, a bit of graphics, a bit of devops, a bit of writing.

Like this I am kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. But at least not bored :D

Collapse
 
tim_birkett profile image
Tim Birkett

Working with teams under the influence of a tyrannical date-driven micromanaging delivery manager. Literally anything not feature related is at the bottom of the backlog and process and bureaucracy strangles quality, creativity and innovation.

Collapse
 
ksolomon profile image
Keith Solomon

Not project-related, but I’m living through it right now…I injured my dominant hand… 😱

It’s been x-rayed, nothing broken or dislocated, but it was too swollen for them to assess the tendons & ligaments. I go back tomorrow for a follow-up.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Get well soon brother!

Collapse
 
pixelrella profile image
Pixelrella

As mobile game programmer, device specific bugs are the worst :D They take ages to be found and solved. You need a very specific device to reproduce the error. There are so many different devices, some are not even available in your country, or not in sales rotations anymore.

The fixes are usually not nice either, you kinda have to implement a workaround because you don't really get to the source of the problem which makes the code smelly.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Such bugs are the worst to find and debug. The fixes are usually ugly too, you have to use a workaround because you can't really solve the root cause of the problem.

Collapse
 
dionarodrigues profile image
Diona Rodrigues • Edited

Working in IT for many years, I believe I have experienced some ups and downs in terms of motivation to learn and share development knowledge. So one thing I'm afraid of is becoming unmotivated enough to abandon this field. This would be my nightmare.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Stay consistent and it will help keep you engaged and motivated. Don't let the fear of losing interest become a nightmare! 😉

Collapse
 
shradhhu_53 profile image
Shraddha Khattar

One thing that I wouldn't call a nightmare, but definitely dislike, is failing tests on GitHub Actions due to network issues. Damn it!

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

I haven't experienced this much, but in one of the open-source projects I work on, sometimes there are failures when downloading packages while setting up the environment!

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Kudos to you for being the go-to person when things go haywire. It's a wild journey, but fixing these must feel like a victory every time! 💪

BTW, do you use any tools or frameworks to automate or monitor your ETL processes?

 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

@kwnaidoo Cool! I haven't used Cloudwatch, but personally, for a New Relic alternative, I rely on either Dynatrace or Datadog. Building your own internal monitoring system from scratch seems like a senior-level engineering task. Thanks a lot for sharing such a beautiful stack! 🙌

Collapse
 
tom-leamon profile image
AVsync.LIVE

I make software for creating concert visuals, so my biggest fear would be introducing a bug which causes an artist’s performance to be visibly disrupted at a big event with lots of eyes on stage.

Collapse
 
saji37 profile image
Sajith Thomas

Nowadays the nightmare for most of the developers is AI taking over IT which will not be happening in short term, but definitely in future

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

It's definitely worrying that AI might take over IT in the future.

Collapse
 
bui378 profile image
Alain

My biggest nightmare is company's message: "Our contract was stopped!!!".
😉

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

I guess this is everyone's nightmare! 😂

Collapse
 
kurealnum profile image
Oscar • Edited

I'm terrified of writing 300+ lines of code, and then realizing that I prematurely optimized everything. This has happened one too many times 😅.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Totally get that fear! Better to find the balance than over-optimize. 😓

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

I have had to deal with this issue so much. I can't even explain how frustrating it is for me to use a library that lacks documentation.

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

@abneribeiro Thanks for sharing! 🙌

Collapse
 
leonpang profile image
Leon Pang

There are too many hard time during my career,
1-no specific requirement
2-had to use a close source framework and only has bad doc
3-Must be compatible with IE8
4-long history codes without any ticket or annotation

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

I totally get it! The struggles with poor docs. I don't quite recall having to make a project IE8 compatible nowadays. 🤷‍♂️

Collapse
 
jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

My nightmare as a dev is all the setup prior to programming but necessary for programming.
It's so insanely fragile and uninteresting and with a great time-wasting potential !

Collapse
 
shricodev profile image
Shrijal Acharya

Yeah, this is boring, so I store my editor and basic terminal dotfile configs in a separate dotfiles repository to handle the tedious setup process!

Collapse
 
antoniomarques profile image
António Marques

'Hi everyone, I'd like to share an experience from migrating to Next.js. Initially, I encountered a significant versioning issue in a project I was working on. I spent hours updating libraries, but nothing seemed to work. Later, I discovered that the solution was simply to add the --force flag and run a codemod script to automate code transformations. I was a bit frustrated to realize that it was much simpler than I had imagined.

Now, I'm seeking suggestions and advice on authentication and authorization in Next.js. How can I handle these aspects more efficiently, especially in large projects? If anyone has tips or best practices, I would greatly appreciate the help!'

Collapse
 
bbkr profile image
Paweł bbkr Pabian

Bloatware.

When development cycle only focuses on new features but there are no features evaluation periods and cleanups.

Even with best coding practices this leads to dependency quagmire. Whatever you are trying to change is very likely to be entangled in gazilion of places, most of them are just dead features - hundreds lines of code used by extremly small percentage of clients or not used at all. Leading to very tedious product development.

Collapse
 
tom-leamon profile image
AVsync.LIVE

Ok robot