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 want? 😄
During the talk, I felt like I was among my people — that beautiful species of nerds who laugh at programming jokes without needing them explained ❤️
I’ll write a proper recap next week, but for now, a quick story from yesterday.
I was sitting at the airport in Munich.
For five hours.
Not exactly the plan.
I was supposed to have a one-hour layover and be enjoying the Italian sun by 5 PM. Instead, my first flight got delayed, I missed the connection, and… well.
Luckily, there was another flight later that day. Six hours later…
But as we say in Poland: every cloud has a silver lining.
I used that time to add fallbacks for absolutely EVERYTHING in my presentation. (Yes, I even installed service workers last minute — and it saved me later like crazy 🔥)
I also definitely hit my daily cardio goal trying to navigate that absurdly large airport.
And when boredom finally kicked in, I started writing this post.
This is also a small tribute to @hadil and her brilliant post:
You're the real JavaScript Developer Only If.... I’ve wanted to write something like this for months. And since I haven’t written anything in this style in a while… I’ve earned it 😄
You’re a real developer only if:
💥 You’ve broken production at least once
There’s even a Polish saying:
“Kto produkcji nie wy*ebie, ten nie zazna szczęścia w niebie”
Loosely translated into English:
“If prod you’ve never slain, dev heaven you won’t gain.” 😄
🐛 You’ve fixed a bug… completely by accident
Something sat in TODO for months (or years), and suddenly… it just works.
Or you changed something totally unrelated and magically fixed another issue.
No idea why. No idea how.
You just slowly back away and hope it stays that way.
🤯 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").
🧨 You were afraid to touch code that looks terrible… but works
Because deep down you know:
“This is held together by vibes and legacy decisions.”
And if you touch it, something completely unrelated will break.
💻 You wrote code that worked perfectly locally…
…and exploded in production
- different environment
- missing env variable
- timezone issues
- race conditions
- or just… vibes again
🗑️ You accidentally dropped a database
Maybe not the whole thing. Maybe just a table. Maybe just half the data.
But still. Character development.
🖥️ You’ve said:
“It works on my machine.”
And you meant it. With full confidence.
🔄 You blamed the backend (if you’re frontend)…
or the frontend (if you’re backend)
Preferably both, within the same debugging session.
🧠 During one debugging session you thought:
- first: “I’m an idiot.”
- then: “Wait… I’m a genius.”
Sometimes multiple times in a loop.
Final verdict
If you answered “yes” to most of these:
👉 congratulations, you’re definitely a software developer.
If about half:
👉 you just need more experience.
If less than two:
👉 what are you even doing here? Go write more code 😄
Your turn 👇
What would YOU add to this list?
Because I’m 100% sure we’ve all got at least one story that would fit perfectly here 😄
Top comments (165)
Hey checklist time for me 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:
Thanks! Great post :D
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 😂)
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
😄
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.
This is an absolutely epic bug 💥❤️
that is mah job
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 😄
How do they even know to begin with other than GPTzero?
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 😂
Same here - maybe Elon Musk snuck into my house at night and gave me a neuralink
I love Munich Airport, so many great memories there. I'm way too attached to Munich in general, I love the city! And don't even get me started about Italy - it's an absolutely gorgeous country. ♥️
Chilling at airports is one of my favorite things. When my flight gets delayed or I've got a long layover, I see everyone else stressing and I'm just like, "yeah, whatever." I like it here. I've got my laptop and my phone... I could stay here forever 😂
There's one better think than chilling on the airport. Chilling on the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna and doing absolutely nothing. Which is exactly what I'm doing RIGHT NOW 😀
Imma just put a request in at HQ to come here for
vacationIT purposes(I'll just say a new IDE agent is being launched here)
"For IT purposes" 😂
So specific they'd be insane not to approve it 😁
Guys, where are we heading next for “IT purposes”? 😄 Maybe the Maldives? 😂
I'm down! ✅️
I'm INCREDIBLY jealous right now. Happy?! 🤣
Hahaha sorry 😂😂😂
You just gave me a motivation to start planning a new trip there 😂🇮🇹😍
So true! I think I’ve made every single one of these mistakes — some of them more than once 😄
But that’s really the cost of learning: no mistakes, no lessons that actually stick.
And honestly, @javz’s example is exactly why I stopped touching CSS altogether!
Looking forward to your recap of jsDay 2026 🚀
Exactly, Pascal!
That’s why we can laugh about it — because the truth is: the only one who makes no mistakes is the one who does nothing 😂
Awesome post, can relate so much!
I keep a whiteboard next to my desk with a "How did this ever work" counter. Each time I'm debugging something and think to myself "how on earth did this ever work?", I add one to the counter. It's become a bit of a meme in my work place where people get curious if they notice me adding one and ask me to explain what obscure bug I'm working on now :D
Hahahaha I love this! 😄
If I wasn’t working remotely, I’d 100% have the same thing on my whiteboard starting Monday 😂
at my desk i have a "days until being fired" counter
🧨 You were afraid to touch code that looks terrible… but works
--- instead ---
I am not afraid to make a code that looks terrible... but works
So I created a M||D||JS
dev.to/pengeszikra/mdjs-mordorjs-1mon
Hahaha I love it :D BTW I really like this page: dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/
finally the demo video is upgraded.
The line that hits: "You just slowly back away and hope it stays that way." That's not incompetence, that's pattern recognition. You've learned that some bugs fix themselves and asking why is a trap. The real developer instinct isn't understanding everything. It's knowing which mysteries to leave unsolved.
I love that part about leaving some mysteries unresolved! 😄
I think this post just confirmed something for me:
I’m absolutely not the kind of developer who earns XP by breaking prod.
My work lives in a different ecosystem—the “if this ever breaks, something foundational has gone wrong” ecosystem.
So while I haven’t dropped a database or fixed a bug by accident… I have spent years designing systems so those things don’t happen in the first place.
Which probably disqualifies me from the “chaos‑driven dev” badge, but I’ll survive 😄
Depends on the project. I think all of us would love to spend years designing bulletproof systems.
But in the real world, we show up to work and get a 7-year-old codebase written by juniors, with tasks that were due yesterday.
Been in too many production war trenches, these all hit too close to home bahahaha
Exactly 😄
And with all the extra examples in the comments, my post is starting to feel a bit poor now 😂
btw, is that you in the cover photo? i'd believe if you say yes haha
Hahaha nooo, it's just how GPT see me 😂
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