“To err is human, to debug divine.”
If you’ve been writing code for any stretch of time, you’ve probably stared at your screen wondering how something so small could break so much. Whether it’s a misplaced semicolon, an off-by-one error, or deploying to production with test credentials (guilty 😅), every developer—junior or senior—has stories of mistakes they’ve made.
Let’s face it: mistakes are not just part of the development process—they are the development process.
The Illusion of Perfection
There's a common myth, especially among beginners, that good developers don't make mistakes. That once you’re “senior,” you write perfect code the first time.
Spoiler: Nobody does.
In fact, senior developers often make bigger mistakes—but they catch and fix them faster because they’ve learned how to deal with them.
Why Mistakes Matter
Mistakes aren’t just inevitable—they’re useful. They reveal assumptions, force you to dig deeper into how systems work, and often lead to better solutions than you would have considered otherwise. Here’s what mistakes teach us:
Clarity: They expose where our understanding is shallow.
Resilience: They teach us how to handle failure calmly.
Humility: They remind us that there’s always more to learn.
A Culture of Blame vs. a Culture of Learning
One of the worst things a dev team can do is foster a culture where mistakes are punished. This leads to fear, cover-ups, and stagnation.
Great teams treat mistakes as data points. When something breaks, the question isn't “Who messed up?”—it’s “How can we make this less likely to happen again?”
That might mean:
Improving test coverage.
Setting up guardrails (like staging environments or automated linting).
Writing clearer documentation.
Doing post-mortems without finger-pointing.
Your Mistake Recovery Toolbox
Here are a few practical things every developer should keep in their mental toolkit when mistakes happen:
Stay Calm
Panicking never helps. Take a breath, grab a coffee, and remember: you are not your bug.Reproduce It
If you can reproduce the bug, you can fix the bug. Step-by-step isolation is often the fastest way forward.Use Version Control
If you’re not using Git (or similar), start now. Version control is the ultimate undo button.Write Tests Around It
Write a test that fails because of the bug. Then fix it. This not only confirms the fix—it prevents regressions.Learn and Share
Write about it, tweet it, blog it, bring it up in retros. Your mistake could prevent someone else’s.
Some Famous Dev Mistakes
GitHub once deleted part of their production database.
AWS once took down a major part of the internet with a typo.
Google once lost an entire day of email due to a bad config.
These are massive companies with brilliant engineers. Mistakes still happen. What sets them apart is how they respond.
Final Thoughts
Programming is a constant process of learning, breaking, fixing, and improving. Mistakes are not bugs in you—they’re features of the process.
So next time you bork the deployment or introduce a hard-to-find bug, don’t beat yourself up. Reflect, fix, learn—and maybe even laugh about it later.
Because at the end of the day, real growth in software engineering happens not in the absence of mistakes, but in how we respond to them.
Top comments (1)
Love this so much, honestly half my coding hours are just me wrestling with my own mistakes and trying to fix stuff - you think learning to laugh at bugs is maybe the most underrated dev skill?