My first real code broke and I panicked on my kitchen floor

I was staring at my laptop at 2am while my three kids slept, and a single missing semicolon crashed my entire JavaScript page. Turns out reading the error message line by line instead of guessing fixed it in 5 minutes. Has anyone else spent hours debugging just to find it was something tiny?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricia_wright1mo ago

Did you check the error console before tearing your hair out?

blaker751mo ago

Hey, a semicolon isn't the only thing that can crash JavaScript. A missing bracket or a typo in a variable name will do it just as fast. I've spent way too many late nights chasing phantom bugs that turned out to be a single stray character.

josephb356d ago

Did you ever notice how the smallest bugs feel like personal attacks at 2am? That missing bracket got me so bad once I literally rewrote 200 lines of code from scratch. Turns out the original was fine, just a single curly brace on the wrong line.