What's your biggest nightmare as a developer?
Shrijal Acharya

Shrijal Acharya @shricodev

About: Full Stack SDE • Open-Source Contributor • Collaborator @Oppia • Mail for collaboration

Location:
Kathmandu, Nepal
Joined:
Jul 26, 2023

What's your biggest nightmare as a developer?

Publish Date: Dec 25 '23
48 44

Hey, dev's 👋

As a developer, you might have faced many challenges and frustrations in your projects. But what is the worst thing that could happen to you in your tech career? Feel free to share it in the comments section. 👇

I'll go first. I work mostly on full-stack projects, and my biggest nightmare is having to debug a bug for hours, only to discover it's in the library/framework I am using or a compatibility issue. 💀

If you've ever worked with Next.js, you may completely relate to this.

Comments 44 total

  • Randall
    RandallDec 25, 2023

    I work in crypto and people constantly try to hack us. So my biggest fear is authoring a bug that leads to bajillions of dollars in theft! Of course, that sort of thing is never one person's sole fault, since we have code reviews, QA, security audits, etc, and security is the responsibility of the organization as a whole. Still, I'd sure hate to be the one who opened the file and typed in the bug.

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 25, 2023

      I get it! It's scary to think about making a mistake in crypto code that could lead to a lot of money being stolen. I think that is a valid nightmare for most developers, especially in the crypto space. Keep being careful!

    • Keff
      KeffDec 26, 2023

      Haha working in crypto is already a nightmare without that responsibility 😂 I've been there, but stopped cause I hate crypto

    • Paweł bbkr Pabian
      Paweł bbkr PabianDec 29, 2023

      Same fear can be present if company is dealing with a lot of personal information. Leak can lead to avalanche of personal lawsuits. On top of that in EU penalty for data leak can be as high as 20 000 000 EUR or 4% worldwide company turnover.

    • billy the kid
      billy the kidDec 30, 2023

      hold on a second, are you guys talking about cryptology or cryptocurrency? Does that go without saying these days, am I becoming an old fart?

      Please keep in mind I know nothing about you @mistval both personally and professionally, but If nothing else i gotta say i love that you are self-conscious enough to not only know your own limits as a developer - not be afraid to lay your cards on the table, it takes a degree of humbleness to do that and it's the one quality I find indispensable amongst whom I chose to work with. It can be really dangerous when people are both responsible for owning some code or infrastructure, and insecure about the requisite skills and expertise it takes to do that competently. Kudos to you!

      • Randall
        RandallDec 31, 2023

        Thank you Billy for your kind words :) It's crypto as in cryptocurrency. I should have said I work in "blockchain", that would be less ambiguous!

  • Shraddha Khattar
    Shraddha KhattarDec 25, 2023

    One thing that I wouldn't call a nightmare, but definitely dislike, is failing tests on GitHub Actions due to network issues. Damn it!

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 25, 2023

      I haven't experienced this much, but in one of the open-source projects I work on, sometimes there are failures when downloading packages while setting up the environment!

  • Diona Rodrigues
    Diona RodriguesDec 25, 2023

    Working in IT for many years, I believe I have experienced some ups and downs in terms of motivation to learn and share development knowledge. So one thing I'm afraid of is becoming unmotivated enough to abandon this field. This would be my nightmare.

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 25, 2023

      Stay consistent and it will help keep you engaged and motivated. Don't let the fear of losing interest become a nightmare! 😉

  • Shrijal Acharya
    Shrijal AcharyaDec 25, 2023

    @abneribeiro Thanks for sharing! 🙌

  • Alain
    AlainDec 25, 2023

    My biggest nightmare is company's message: "Our contract was stopped!!!".
    😉

  • Keith Solomon
    Keith Solomon Dec 26, 2023

    Not project-related, but I’m living through it right now…I injured my dominant hand… 😱

    It’s been x-rayed, nothing broken or dislocated, but it was too swollen for them to assess the tendons & ligaments. I go back tomorrow for a follow-up.

  • Oscar
    OscarDec 26, 2023

    I'm terrified of writing 300+ lines of code, and then realizing that I prematurely optimized everything. This has happened one too many times 😅.

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 27, 2023

      Totally get that fear! Better to find the balance than over-optimize. 😓

  • Keff
    KeffDec 26, 2023

    Monotony tbh. There's nothing more boring and draining than a monotone development job (for me at least). No challenges and no change is a recipe for burnout and nightmares. The idea of doing the same work over and over again for an undetermined amount of time fucking scares the shit out of me.

    This was the reason I had to stop working earlier this year to take a break. I left in April and still haven't considered looking for another job.

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 27, 2023

      Absolutely! It's essential to find fulfillment in your work. Take the time you need to explore opportunities.

    • Cesar Aguirre
      Cesar AguirreDec 28, 2023

      That's true! Being there and done that!

    • Pixelrella
      PixelrellaDec 29, 2023

      Same here! I usually switch jobs after some time, simply because I just get too bored of the tasks I am supposed to do.

      In a new job, there are new tools and different approaches to learn, at least xD.

      I also start a lot of different initiatives like refactoring code for optimization or readability, some UX improvements, or building the developer knowledge base. When that get's boring. I'll try to see if I could be engaged with other tasks or tools, looking for holes in the process.

      That approach of course depends on how freely you can assign your time, though. If all your time is constantly planned for some super important stuff that needs to go out by yesterday, you don't get to do fun stuff at work. And this also depends on your interest/motivation/will to start initiatives at work.

      I also try out and combine different roles. I switched from backend developer, to full stack, to Unity developer, back to backend, a bit of systems, a bit of graphics, a bit of devops, a bit of writing.

      Like this I am kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. But at least not bored :D

  • Leon Pang
    Leon PangDec 27, 2023

    There are too many hard time during my career,
    1-no specific requirement
    2-had to use a close source framework and only has bad doc
    3-Must be compatible with IE8
    4-long history codes without any ticket or annotation

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 27, 2023

      I totally get it! The struggles with poor docs. I don't quite recall having to make a project IE8 compatible nowadays. 🤷‍♂️

  • Shrijal Acharya
    Shrijal AcharyaDec 27, 2023

    I have had to deal with this issue so much. I can't even explain how frustrating it is for me to use a library that lacks documentation.

  • Shrijal Acharya
    Shrijal AcharyaDec 27, 2023

    Kudos to you for being the go-to person when things go haywire. It's a wild journey, but fixing these must feel like a victory every time! 💪

    BTW, do you use any tools or frameworks to automate or monitor your ETL processes?

  • Tim Birkett
    Tim BirkettDec 27, 2023

    Working with teams under the influence of a tyrannical date-driven micromanaging delivery manager. Literally anything not feature related is at the bottom of the backlog and process and bureaucracy strangles quality, creativity and innovation.

  • Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard
    Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ FayardDec 27, 2023

    My nightmare as a dev is all the setup prior to programming but necessary for programming.
    It's so insanely fragile and uninteresting and with a great time-wasting potential !

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 28, 2023

      Yeah, this is boring, so I store my editor and basic terminal dotfile configs in a separate dotfiles repository to handle the tedious setup process!

  • Sajith Thomas
    Sajith ThomasDec 28, 2023

    Nowadays the nightmare for most of the developers is AI taking over IT which will not be happening in short term, but definitely in future

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 28, 2023

      It's definitely worrying that AI might take over IT in the future.

  • Shrijal Acharya
    Shrijal AcharyaDec 28, 2023

    @kwnaidoo Cool! I haven't used Cloudwatch, but personally, for a New Relic alternative, I rely on either Dynatrace or Datadog. Building your own internal monitoring system from scratch seems like a senior-level engineering task. Thanks a lot for sharing such a beautiful stack! 🙌

  • AVsync.LIVE
    AVsync.LIVEDec 28, 2023

    Ok robot

  • AVsync.LIVE
    AVsync.LIVEDec 28, 2023

    I make software for creating concert visuals, so my biggest fear would be introducing a bug which causes an artist’s performance to be visibly disrupted at a big event with lots of eyes on stage.

  • Pixelrella
    PixelrellaDec 29, 2023

    As mobile game programmer, device specific bugs are the worst :D They take ages to be found and solved. You need a very specific device to reproduce the error. There are so many different devices, some are not even available in your country, or not in sales rotations anymore.

    The fixes are usually not nice either, you kinda have to implement a workaround because you don't really get to the source of the problem which makes the code smelly.

    • Shrijal Acharya
      Shrijal AcharyaDec 29, 2023

      Such bugs are the worst to find and debug. The fixes are usually ugly too, you have to use a workaround because you can't really solve the root cause of the problem.

  • Paweł bbkr Pabian
    Paweł bbkr PabianDec 29, 2023

    Bloatware.

    When development cycle only focuses on new features but there are no features evaluation periods and cleanups.

    Even with best coding practices this leads to dependency quagmire. Whatever you are trying to change is very likely to be entangled in gazilion of places, most of them are just dead features - hundreds lines of code used by extremly small percentage of clients or not used at all. Leading to very tedious product development.

  • António Marques
    António MarquesDec 29, 2023

    'Hi everyone, I'd like to share an experience from migrating to Next.js. Initially, I encountered a significant versioning issue in a project I was working on. I spent hours updating libraries, but nothing seemed to work. Later, I discovered that the solution was simply to add the --force flag and run a codemod script to automate code transformations. I was a bit frustrated to realize that it was much simpler than I had imagined.

    Now, I'm seeking suggestions and advice on authentication and authorization in Next.js. How can I handle these aspects more efficiently, especially in large projects? If anyone has tips or best practices, I would greatly appreciate the help!'

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