Every line of code carries a risk — a bug waiting to happen, an error waiting to be found. But every mistake also carries a lesson. This is one of those stories.
🖥️ The moment of panic
When I finished a task assigned and ran the app to test, the console spat out a stack trace.
Instantly, my mind raced: “What went wrong? Did something wrong ?”
It’s a feeling every developer knows — a mix of emotion: panic, and despair. You read the stack trace, try to understand it.
I started tracing the error line by line, imagining the flow of my code. I realized that a control statement was wrong and I though:
“Ahah! Found it — now it should work!”
But after fixing it and running again… it still failed. Hours passed. Stress mounted. Frustration grew. It felt like find a needle in a haystack. And suddenly, the culprit appeared — a semicolon (;) missing.
“All that stress, and it was just a semicolon?” I laughed in disbelief.
It was such a tiny mistake, but it left a huge impression. That small semicolon can easily derail everything — and how patience requires to debugging.
🔍 Learn from the experience
Even such a small mistake taught me more than any learning resources ever could. Reflecting on this, I saw that true learning is always a combination of theory and practice. Theory teaches you the rules, the concepts, and the logic behind the code via books — the what, the why, and the how. Tutorials, on the other hand, show you the steps to follow. They are helpful for getting started, but if you just follow them blindly without thinking, you can easily fall into “Tutorial Hell.” It’s only when you struggle through a problem on your own, experimenting, failing, and reflecting, that the concepts finally stick.
💡 The Lessons Learned
Mistakes are part of coding — every bug is just another step. That tiny semicolon wasn’t only an error; it was a lesson. One line of code can cause a bug, one bug can reveal an error, and each error teaches you something new. Facing them, trying fixes, and figuring things out is how understanding really grows. Code, bug, error — it’s more than debugging; it’s the way we learn and get better with every project. True mastery doesn’t come from avoiding mistakes; it comes from doing, failing, reflecting, and doing it again.
That’s all I wanted to share. Thanks for reading, 👋