Debugging is a journey—a painful, soul-crushing journey that no developer escapes. It starts with hope (“This will be a quick fix”) and ends with despair (“Burn it all down”) before looping endlessly into the abyss.
Psychologists call this the five stages of grief. Developers call it a normal Tuesday.
Let’s break it down.
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Denial: “It Works on My Machine”
You just got a bug report. No way it’s real.
- “It works fine for me.”
- “Are you sure you ran it correctly?”
- “Try restarting your computer.”
You run the code. It seems fine. You check again. No issues. Clearly, the bug reporter is mistaken. Maybe they’re using the wrong version? Maybe they’re cursed?
Then, you test it in production.
🚨 Boom. 🚨
It’s real. And it’s ugly.
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Anger: “Who Wrote This Garbage?!”
Now the rage sets in. You start dissecting the code, and it is atrocious.
- “What idiot wrote this?”
- “Why is this function 500 lines long?”
- “Oh no… it was me.”
Even worse: The code works sometimes, just not consistently. Welcome to the Heisenbug, where observing the problem changes the problem.
At this point, you consider a career in goat farming.
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Bargaining: “Maybe If I Just…”
Time to start making deals with the Debugging Gods.
- “What if I just add a small delay?”
- “What if I try switching branches and back again?”
- “What if I update my dependencies and pray?”
You try random fixes with zero understanding of the root cause. Magic numbers, weird log statements, console.log("HERE!!!")—you throw everything at it.
Then, suddenly…
✨ It starts working. ✨
But you have no idea why.
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Depression: “This Codebase Should Be Burned to the Ground”
An hour has passed. Or maybe five. Time is meaningless now.
- Your screen is a graveyard of print statements.
- You’ve opened 50 Stack Overflow tabs.
- The coffee is cold and sad.
You begin questioning everything.
- “Am I even good at this?”
- “Why did I choose this career?”
- “Is the bug… me?”
The only thing keeping you going is the fact that nobody else wants to fix this either.
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Acceptance: “Fine, I’ll Actually Read the Error Message”
At rock bottom, you do something radical:
- You slow down.
- You read the error message properly.
- You step through the code like a sane person.
And finally… you find it.
One tiny missing semicolon.
One mistyped variable name.
One race condition that only happens when the moon aligns with Mercury in retrograde.
You fix it. You commit. You merge.
🎉 Victory. 🎉
Until QA reports a new bug.
And the cycle begins again.
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What’s the Worst Bug You’ve Ever Debugged?
Drop your debugging horror stories in the comments. Bonus points if the final fix was something embarrassingly small.
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