When Debugging Became Belonging: What Nearly 15 Years of Helping Developers Taught Me

The first time code made me question my place in tech, it was not elegant. It was not cinematic either, unless your favorite genre is “junior developer stares at legacy JavaScript while silently bargaining with the universe.” Mine happened on a gray Monday morning, the kind of morning where even coffee feels underqualified. I had just been given my first real bug on my first real project at a company paying me real money to write code. That should have felt empowering. Instead, it felt like being handed a fork and asked to repair a jet engine. The instruction was almost offensive in its simplicity: “Just fix this bug.” Anyone who has worked with old code knows that “just” is one of the most dangerous words in software development. I opened the file and found the usual archaeological layers of logic, half-decisions, mysterious comments, and code that looked like three different developers had fought each other and the code had won. I tried to run the app. Errors. I changed something. Mo