You Might Be a Developer If You’ve Ever Yelled at a Semicolon

There are moments in life that bind us together. Birth, death, taxes... and screaming at a semicolon because you spent three hours debugging a problem that ended up being a typo with commitment issues.

If you’ve ever wanted to kick your IDE into the sun, congratulations: you might be a developer.

This one’s for you—the keyboard warriors, the tab-versus-space veterans, the caffeine-powered bug whisperers. Let’s see how many of these hit uncomfortably close to home.

You measure time in cups of coffee, not hours.

Your morning standup isn’t complete until you've got a hot cup of bean juice and the thousand-yard stare of someone who was still thinking about code while brushing their teeth.

You’ve yelled “WHY IS THIS BROKEN?!” just to realize you didn’t save the file.

You: angrily pacing, mentally preparing to rewrite your entire app.
VSCode: “Maybe hit Cmd+S before you declare war, champ.”

You’ve built a complex solution before Googling the simple one.

You wrote a 200-line recursive function when the answer was Array.prototype.reduce() and Stack Overflow comment #3. But hey, at least you learned something. Probably.

You’ve fixed a bug and immediately forgot how you did it.

Did you solve it? Yes.
Do you understand why? Not even a little.
Will it break again next sprint? You bet your GitHub it will.

You’ve committed “final-final-fix-FORREAL-v2.js”

And you meant it that time. You really did. Right until QA kicked it back again and you introduced a new branch called whyGodWhy.

You’ve been treated like a wizard because you fixed something in 5 seconds.

“Wow, how did you know it was the DNS?”
It’s always the DNS. Or the cache. Or some mystical combination of both designed to haunt your dreams.

You’ve renamed a variable just to feel something.

Code still broken? Rename data to payload. Still broken. Rename it to stuff. Still broken. Rename it to screamingVoid. Emotionally accurate. Still broken.

And yes—you’ve yelled at a semicolon.

That smug little punctuation mark just sitting there, silently judging you while your app crashes. It always looks so innocent. Until it ruins your week.

Being a developer is one part logic, one part caffeine, and eight parts slowly spiraling into madness because of something that shouldn't be this hard.

But it’s also kind of beautiful.

You solve puzzles for a living. You build things out of nothing. You take chaos and wrangle it into something useful (or at least something that compiles). You live on the edge of burnout and breakthrough.

And you do it all knowing that somewhere, somehow, there’s another semicolon just waiting to mess with you again.

So here’s to the devs.

May your bugs be shallow, your branches clean, and your coffee strong enough to carry the emotional damage.