There’s a strange calm that shows up after hours of staring at your screen, chasing down a bug that refuses to make sense. And then suddenly, it does. That moment when the dots connect and the error disappears. It’s not just relief. It’s something better.
Debugging isn’t the part of coding that anyone shows off. It doesn’t make it to portfolios or social posts. But it’s where most of us actually become better developers. Writing code teaches you how to tell a computer what to do. Debugging teaches you how to understand why it didn’t.
When I started coding, bugs felt personal. Like tiny reminders that I wasn’t good enough yet. But after a while, I realised they weren’t enemies. They were clues. The computer wasn’t mocking me; it was trying to tell me something. Every error was a hint saying, “Almost there, keep going.”
Once you see it that way, debugging becomes less about frustration and more about curiosity. You stop feeling defeated and start investigating. You open tabs you’ve never opened before, read documentation you’d normally skip, and suddenly find yourself learning things you never planned to.
Some of my best coding memories aren’t about launching a finished product. They’re about the quiet, focused moments when I finally found what was breaking everything. That mix of exhaustion and satisfaction when the console goes clean is hard to beat.
Debugging might not look glamorous from the outside, but it’s where growth actually happens. It teaches patience, humility, and attention to detail. It reminds you that progress is messy and that mistakes are part of the craft.
If you can learn to love the problem, the solution eventually feels inevitable.
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