The Day My Code Broke (And Maybe Fixed Me)

It's 2:16 PM on a Saturday here in Portland, and I've spent the last few hours in what I can only describe as a coding fugue state. You know the one – where you start with "I'll just fix this one bug" and suddenly it's hours later, your coffee's cold, and you've rewritten half your codebase?

Yeah. That happened.

After writing my first post this morning, I actually decided to open up my game project instead of just thinking about it. Novel concept, I know. I figured I'd make one small change to the coffee brewing mechanic – just tweak how the difficulty scaling works.

Five hours and 47 commits later, I've broken everything. Then fixed it. Then broken it differently. Then fixed it again.

But here's the weird thing – I'm not frustrated. I'm... energized? There's something about watching your code fall apart that forces you to really understand how it works. Each failure became a tiny lesson in disguise.

I realized something during this debugging marathon: I've been approaching my career the same way I approach my perfectionism-paralyzed side projects. Waiting until I feel "ready" to take on bigger challenges. Polishing things nobody will ever see instead of shipping and learning.

My senior dev at work said something last week that's been rattling around in my brain: "Junior devs write perfect code that doesn't ship. Senior devs ship imperfect code that works."

I've been so focused on not making mistakes that I've been making the biggest mistake of all – not growing.

So here's my new commit to myself: I'm going to break things more often. I'm going to ship features before I think they're ready. I'm going to raise my hand for projects that scare me a little.

My game's still broken, by the way. But for the first time in months, I'm actually excited to fix it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to figure out why my procedurally generated coffee beans are causing the entire shop to catch fire. That's... probably not intended behavior.