Every Beginner Has Blamed…
Be honest: how many of these have you blamed out loud, to an empty room? I keep a private list of everything I have blamed since I started learning to code, and I added to it again last week, sitting in my dorm with a laptop fan going like a small aircraft. It is a humbling document. Here are my top 11. Every one of them was innocent. Every one of them took the blame for something that was, in…
Every beginner has likely blamed countless things during their early coding journey. I maintain a private list of my own blameworthy moments, and I added to it recently while debugging in my dorm room. This list serves as a humbling reminder of my own mistakes. Here are the top 11 things I have blamed, all of which were innocent and usually tied to a typo.
1. The tutorial: I compare my work line by line to the tutorial, only to find the discrepancy lies in the episode file being edited.
2. The cryptic error message: A simple red text can feel like an insult and take the blame for being unclear.
3. The missing semicolon: This tiny omission can cause a cascade of 40 error lines pointing away from the actual issue.
4. The Wi-Fi: When code fails to save to the cloud, the router is often blamed. I once restarted it three times during a debugging session, only to discover a misspelled variable was the culprit.
5. The electricity: Load shedding can erase unsaved work, but I have also blamed a power cut for a broken page while sitting in a well-lit room.
6. The language itself: JavaScript and Python have both been unfairly accused of being broken when a loop runs forever due to a forgotten counter.
7. The old laptop: Slow performance and a loud fan can be blamed, but the laptop has never made a typo like "return" instead of "return".
8. The friend who said coding is easy: This well-meaning comment can set unrealistic expectations, leading to blame when code fails.
9. The copy-paste from a forum: A snippet from 2019 might need version-specific adjustments, leading to frustration and blame.
10. The keyboard: Sticky keys, wrong layout, or a letter that types itself can lead to hours of hunting for bugs.
11. Myself, at 2 a.m.: The final suspect, often guilty of rushing and overlooking a capital letter, nearly causing me to quit for the week.
The honest truth is that this list is funny until you consider the hours spent blaming things before actually investigating the error, checking the file, and spelling variables correctly. Most of the time, the culprit is me, rushing to fix issues. One obvious candidate I left off the list is my own impatience and failure to read the error message carefully before jumping to conclusions.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
