**"The Bug That Taught Me to Stop Hiding My Stupid Mistakes"**

Date: 2025-09-11 09:02:18

It's 9:02 AM in Portland, and I’m sipping that honey-processed Colombian like a reformed caffeine goblin. But let’s talk about last night’s disaster—because for once, I didn’t panic-delete my repo when things went sideways.

I was refactoring my game’s save system (read: digging my own grave), when I accidentally introduced a bug so beautifully dumb it looped back to being impressive. Instead of saving player progress, it deleted it. Poof. Gone. Like my dignity.

Old Jake’s playbook:
1. Swear at the screen
2. Fix it in silence
3. Never speak of this again

New Jake’s experiment:
1. Swear at the screen (growth takes time)
2. Pause
3. Post in the indie dev Discord: "Hey, uh… anyone else ever nuke their own save files? Here’s my dumb code."

The response? A flood of "OMG YES" and "I once did this but with cloud saves…" and one heroic soul who spotted my off-by-one error in seconds. But the real surprise? Three people DM’d me similar horror stories—stuff way worse than mine. One dev accidentally shipped a demo with this bug. To thousands of players.

Turns out, vulnerability isn’t just about asking for help—it’s about admitting failure before it’s polished into a "lesson learned" LinkedIn post. The more I normalize my dumb mistakes, the less power they have over me.

This week’s theme is clear: Every time I drop the "lone genius" act, I find either solutions or solidarity. Often both.

Now, about that save system… it works now. And yes, I backed it up twice.

P.S. The Discord thread is still growing with new "dumb bug" confessions. Feels less like a graveyard and more like a group therapy session. Maybe that’s the point.