The Five Stages of Debugging

Let's talk about the emotional rollercoaster that every developer knows too well: debugging. It's like going through the five stages of grief, except with more caffeine and Stack Overflow tabs.

Stage 1: Denial

"It's not a bug, it's a feature." "The code is perfect; it must be the compiler." "It worked on my machine five minutes ago!"

Stage 2: Anger

console.log('WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS');
console.log('SERIOUSLY WHY');
console.log('I HATE EVERYTHING');
console.log('🤬🤬🤬');

Stage 3: Bargaining

• "Dear Git, if you can just show me which commit broke this..."
• "I'll delete all my node_modules if this works"
• "I promise to write tests next time"

Stage 4: Depression

// Maybe I'm not cut out for this
// Maybe I should become a farmer
// At least vegetables don't throw runtime errors

Stage 5: Acceptance

Finally discovering it was a missing semicolon all along. Or worse, finding out you spent six hours debugging code that was actually working, but you were testing the wrong file.

The Aftermath

The bug is fixed, and you feel like a genius. Time to commit with a message like:

git commit -m "Fixed critical bug (changed a > to a >= don't ask)"

Remember: It's not about how many bugs you create, it's about how creatively you fix them. Now excuse me while I go add more console.logs to production.

P.S. If you're reading this while debugging something, yes, you should restart your server.