What's A Coder's Worst Nightmare?

Elon Musk acquiring the product you work on?... 🥲

For me, it's when you do lots of hard good work but it doesn't matter because the product was never put in front of clients, so when you finally go out of the cave, you realize all the hard good work was in vain, you could have stay home and chill playing music instead.

Debugging a big project and just when I'm about to save my code, the computer freezes and gives me the "blue screen of death". I restart my computer and discover all fixes I've made are gone and I have to debug the project all over again.

Oh, where to begin! As a software developer, I've had my fair share of programming nightmares. But if I had to pick just one, I'd say debugging spaghetti code written by someone who's no longer with the company. It's like playing detective in a crime novel written in a language you're still trying to learn, especially when there are no helpful comments or documentation.

On top of that, layering a modern tech stack over a legacy system that's poorly documented is its own kind of horror movie. This is where the plot thickens, right? You're desperately trying to fuse the old and new while frantically documenting everything that the last person didn't. It's a daunting task that has you juggling two programming languages (or more), different frameworks, and countless libraries.

All of this, of course, while keeping an eye on the looming deadline, which moves towards you like a shark's fin slicing through the dark waters of your caffeinated beverages. And don't even get me started on powdered donuts. I mean, really, why can't they make coding-friendly snacks that don't leave your keyboard looking like a snowstorm hit it? 😅

To sum up, my worst nightmare is a legacy system resurrection project with inadequate documentation, an unforgiving deadline, and a box of powdered donuts by my side. Cue the dramatic, ominous soundtrack. 🎵👻

Inheriting the updates/maintenance role on a Wordpress site that has been through the hands of two previous agencies and at least one person on the client side who has a penchant for installing dozens of plugins. When I wanted to do a code audit/clean-up, I was told to work around what was already there. Everything took twice as long to code and QA because the codebase had already transitioned from spaghetti to pure shit before I even got ahold of the instance.

I was so curious about what it would take to unfuck it that I took home a copy of the code and putzed around with it on my own time. At about the 90-hour mark, I decided I had better things to be doing with my time.

Getting stuck due to mismatched versions.

One teammate developing on one version while other doing on other version.

Causes
Main cause

1. Lack of communication

Other causes in beginners

1. Lack of understanding of how to use git and github
2. Lack of importance to Version Control System

Encountering a bug, and exhausting your resources trying to find a fix for it. 9 times out of 10, I'm just looking at a solution for a different problem (i.e. I don't even understand the bug in my code), but every now and then, I do feel as if I've truly exhausted my resources.

I think when we work hard and client thinks we did nothing then it's really disappointing.

Clients

Be a programmer