That Time I Messed Up… and Realized Life is Just npm run dev

Last weekend, I was cooking dinner. Nothing fancy—just pasta. I boiled the water, threw in the pasta, started chopping vegetables, and felt like I was in control. But then… chaos.
I forgot the salt, dropped half the veggies, and nearly burned the sauce. The smoke alarm went off, and my kitchen looked like a war zone.
Standing there in the mess exactly like running npm run dev.

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What Happens When You Run npm run dev?

When you type:

npm run dev

you’re not launching the polished final version of your app. You’re starting a development server. That means:

• Things are still messy (like my kitchen).
• Errors will pop up (like my sauce disaster).
• You can fix things on the fly without breaking the “production” version (thankfully no one else was eating that pasta). Here’s the breakdown:

1. It Reads Your Scripts

Inside package.json, you’ll usually find something like this:

Json
"scripts": {
  "dev": "next dev"
}

So npm run dev just tells npm: look up the "dev" script and execute it. Depending on your project, it might be vite, nodemon, next dev, etc.

2. Development Mode, Not Production

This is where you test, debug, and experiment. You get:
Hot reloading (save → auto-refresh).
Detailed errors (friendly logs instead of cryptic crashes).
A local server (usually http://localhost:3000).

3. Why It Matters

It’s a safe playground. Mistakes here don’t ruin the final app—just like messing up pasta in my kitchen didn’t ruin anyone’s dinner party.

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Restarting When Things Break

When my sauce burned, I didn’t quit. I just restarted—cleaned the pan, tried again, and this time, it worked.
That’s basically what we do with code:

CTRL + C
npm run dev

Restart. Retry. Learn.

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Wrapping It Up

That pasta night taught me a simple lesson:

• Setup takes time (boiling water, starting the dev server).
• Mistakes are normal (burnt sauce, missing dependencies).
• Restarts are part of the process.
• “Dev mode” is where growth happens.

So every time I type npm run dev, I remember: life itself is in development mode. Messy, experimental, but always moving forward.
Keep running dev. Both in projects, and in life.