A brief dive into 2 times I clearly had no clue what I was doing as a developer

Early in our careers as developers, we all have those moments that make us cringe when we look back on them. Those times we fell flat on our faces because of some silly mistake or lack of knowledge.

I‘ve certainly had my fair share of screw-ups. Times where I stared at an angry error message or panicked phone call and thought "I have absolutely no idea how to fix this."

But you know what? Those moments of failure were some of the best teachers. Each bug, each botched deployment, each rookie mistake taught me something I never forgot.

Messing up is inevitable, especially when you‘re starting out. What matters is owning those mistakes, fixing them, and most importantly, learning from them.

In the spirit of turning failures into learning opportunities, I want to share a couple times I made a total mess of things as a developer. Hopefully you can learn from my past cluelessness and avoid these same mistakes.

Story 1: The Case of the Missing Product Images

When I was a junior dev working at an e-commerce company, I was tasked with migrating product images to a new CMS. Sounds straightforward, right?

I wrote a little script to move the image files to the new system. I tested it on staging, saw the image files got transferred, and called it a day. Then we pushed to production.

Soon after, the support calls and emails started rolling in. Customers couldn‘t see any product images on the site. I pulled up a product page and saw that dreaded little broken image icon. My stomach sank.

After some frantic digging, I found the issue. The image paths in the database still pointed to the old CMS. My script had moved the files but not updated the URLs in the database. Such a facepalm moment.

I wrote a SQL query to update all the image paths and the pictures started loading again. Crisis averted but lesson definitely learned – always check your work end-to-end!

It‘s a very common issue. According to research by Ryte Magazine, over 50% of websites contain broken internal image links. So I was certainly not alone in making this mistake. But that didn‘t make me feel any less stupid at the time.

Story 2: The Client Website That Looked Like It Was From 1997

When I was freelancing, I built a simple website for a small business client. They provided me with the images to use. I put together the site, got the client‘s approval, and launched it.

Shortly after, the client emailed me saying the images looked terrible. I loaded up the site and cringed. The images were so pixelated and blurry, it looked like a Geocities page from the 90s.

I thought maybe there was an issue with responsive sizing or compression. But looking closer, I realized the images themselves were just very low resolution. The client had sent me tiny thumbnail-sized files, not the full sized images. In my rush to build the site, I hadn‘t even noticed.

I sheepishly explained to the client that they would need to provide higher quality images. Fortunately they were understanding but I felt so amateur having to ask for that.

Lesson learned – always review the assets provided by clients carefully. Don‘t assume they‘ll be web-ready. Had I caught the low-res images early on, I could have avoided that awkward conversation and just requested better files upfront.

As a general rule of thumb, images for the web should be at least 1000 pixels wide for full screen desktop displays. JPEGs should be compressed at 60-70% quality to reduce file size without noticeable quality loss.

Turning mistakes into mastery

These are just a couple of the many times I‘ve fallen on my face as a developer. I‘ve crashed production databases, sent 500 errors, and broken layouts more times than I care to admit.

One particularly memorable mistake was when I accidentally sent a marketing email blast to over 100,000 users…twice. I had been testing an email automation and didn‘t realize I was using the live distribution list. Cue a very uncomfortable conversation with my boss.

The important thing is that I learned from each of these mistakes. I adopted practices like always working with backups, triple checking email lists before hitting send, and having peers review my pull requests.

Messing up taught me the importance of slowing down, establishing processes to catch errors, and communicating proactively when issues arose. I became meticulous about details like image compression and database migrations.

But more than just learning specific technical skills, each mistake taught me how to handle failure. How to take responsibility, fix issues quickly, and have a growth mindset.

The best senior developers I know are the ones who openly share their mistakes and what they learned. They understand that failure is just a part of the process.

As former lead engineer at Etsy Kellan Elliot-McCrea said:

"Being a good engineer means constantly making and learning from mistakes. It‘s an essential and important part of doing our jobs well."

When you‘re beating yourself up over a bug or failed deployment, remember that every developer has been there. The key is to embrace the mistake and turn it into an opportunity.

Some actionable tips for learning from mistakes:

• Conduct retrospectives after errors or outages. Analyze what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.
• Document best practices and common pitfalls in a team wiki or knowledge base.
• Share post-mortems and lessons learned with your team. Create a culture of openness around failure.
• If you find yourself making the same type of mistake repeatedly, dive deep and figure out the root cause. Is it lack of knowledge, lack of process, or something else?
• Celebrate failures as learning opportunities. Pat yourself on the back for identifying and fixing a problem, not just for avoiding problems entirely.

Conclusion

As developers, our job is to solve problems. But sometimes, we‘re the cause of those problems. We all make mistakes, especially when starting out.

I‘ve lost count of the number of bugs, broken builds, and botched deployments I‘ve caused. But each of those failures made me a better developer. They taught me to think more critically, check my assumptions, and have empathy for the end user.

Embrace your mistakes. Own them, fix them, and most importantly learn from them.
Share your failures openly with your team. You never know who else might be struggling with the same issues and could benefit from your experience.

Mistakes are inevitable. What matters is how you handle them. Do you try to hide them or do you view them as opportunities to improve?

In the wise words of author Zig Ziglar:

"It‘s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts."

So the next time you face-palm over a silly mistake, remember this – you are now a slightly better developer than you were before. As long as you learn from it, no failure is a true failure.

Keep making mistakes and bouncing back higher each time. Embrace the messy, imperfect process of becoming a great developer. It‘s worth it.