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You’re a Real Software Developer Only If…

Sylwia Laskowska on April 09, 2026

Uff, I’m finally done with my talk at jsDay 2026! And honestly? It went at least good. People showed up, they asked questions… what more could you...
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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ • Edited

Hey checklist time for me lol

💥 You’ve broken production at least once

  • I will once @ben merge my PR where I del-I mean optimize code for Faster Forem :)

🐛 You’ve fixed a bug… completely by accident

  • I think so? I remember doing something during a coursework but can't think of it on the top of my head.

🤯 At least once during debugging you thought:
“This makes absolutely no sense.”
And instead of stepping back and thinking…
you added more logs.
And then more logs.
And then one final console.log("WHAT IS GOING ON").

  • Yes. Definitely when I was an undergrad and still to this day XD

🧨 You were afraid to touch code that looks terrible… but works

  • Every Vibe Code app I ever did lol

💻 You wrote code that worked perfectly locally…
…and exploded in production

  • Not yet until @ben merge that PR :)

🗑️ You accidentally dropped a database

  • Not yet. Only intentionally when it comes to learning databases.

🖥️ You’ve said:
“It works on my machine.”
And you meant it. With full confidence.

  • Yes.

🔄 You blamed the backend (if you’re frontend)…

  • Nah.

🧠 During one debugging session you thought:
first: “I’m an idiot.”
then: “Wait… I’m a genius.”
Sometimes multiple times in a loop.

  • Everyday lol.

To be fair, I am still new in the DEV world, so it makes sense. You could also add that if you are a developer:

  • You review PR for three seconds and say LGTM even though dang well that it's not.
  • You stuck on an error for 5 hours and even AI or StackOverFlow can't help you.

Thanks! Great post :D

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Sylwia Laskowska

Hahaha Francis, you’re 100% a software developer 😄
And that 5-hour debugging session? I felt that 😄
(although honestly… sometimes 5 hours is still optimistic, especially with 7-year-old code 😂)

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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ • Edited

I had worst. One time I try fixing a bug for 12 hours straight and it only took me a good night sleep to the next day where it was 3 lines of code 💀

5 hours is too generous if you get lucky lol

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Ben Halpern

😄

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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

please

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Ben Halpern

💥 You’ve broken production at least once

One time I deployed a change which not only took down our site, but directly caused Heroku to go into a "yellow" state on their status page. Not only was our site down, they suspended our account in the process.

This was, I swear, a matter of incompetence, not malice.

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Sylwia Laskowska

This is an absolutely epic bug 💥❤️

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Sylwia Laskowska

Also, please take a moment to appreciate the incredibly dumb hashtag I added with a typo: #devlive 😂
At least no one can accuse me of having the whole post generated by an LLM now 😄

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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

How do they even know to begin with other than GPTzero?

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Sylwia Laskowska

Hahaha yeah, I guess that’s the only “method” people have 😄

To be fair, I do use an LLM to fix my English typos (and sometimes I even write in Polish first and let it translate 😄 But then you really have to watch it so it doesn’t oversimplify everything).

But in Polish I actually write really well. And at some point I even tested it, pasted my own text into GPTZero… and it confidently said it was 90% AI-generated 😂

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Julien Avezou

During one “quick 1-point ticket” you thought: “I’ll just tweak this CSS real quick” and somehow ended up deep in a 6-hour rabbit hole fighting specificity, flexbox, and your will to live.

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Julien Avezou

and congrats on the talk!

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Sylwia Laskowska

Thanks!!! 🥰

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Sylwia Laskowska

TOTALLY 😄
Are you… by any chance me? 😂

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Julien Avezou

Haha I feel a lot of folks can relate to this one, a painful and humbling experience

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Sven Schuchardt

Perfect list 😄

my addition:

You’ve spent hours debugging only to realize the issue lives in a system you don’t even own
…and now you need three teams, two vendors, and a weekly sync to fix it.

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Sylwia Laskowska

No way, another person who is basically me!!! 😄😄
Oh yesss, I know this type of bug way too well 😂

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Adam - The Developer

Been in too many production war trenches, these all hit too close to home bahahaha

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learn2027

Attempt → Failure → Frustration (Pressure Drop ⬇️) → Reflection → Fix → Success → Triumph (Pressure Stabilization ⬆️) → Then... "Wait, why don't I make it even better?" → New Attempt 🔄

It's a delicious vicious cycle.

May you remain creative, outstanding, and blessed with ever more success.

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Ezejah Chimkamma

This is painfully accurate 😂

“It works on my machine” and random bug fixes are basically rites of passage at this point.