You’re staring at your screen after hours of work all leading up to this moment. As you scroll through the endless wall of code, a brief moment of weight lifts off your back as you feel accomplished with what’s in front of you. You run the code and your worst-case scenario appears back to you…an error message.
No matter where you are at skill level, error codes become a recurring random nuisance that pops up time and time again. It’s simply just a part of coding. After days or hours of work, that error message somewhere in your code can only be deemed as a negative. But even with a dreadful bump in your coding road, there’s still a few positives to take away from the experience. In this blog post, we discuss the plus side to messing up as a developer.
You Know Next Time
Being at the would-be finish line only to watch the checkered flag slowly move further away from you is a good enough reason to make sure the mistake doesn’t happen again. Bugs in coding slow down the process and could quickly add hours of more work onto your already stacked workload. Which could result in longer days or miss project deadlines.
Being able to identify the mistake and learn from it can swiftly bring you up to speed on where the misstep in the code was. But more importantly – how to prevent it from happening in the future by learning the cause and solution. The longer you write code, the more scenarios play out. By the time you are very comfortable tackling hard projects often, there’s plenty of tips of the trade you carry with you in coding task to coding task. So next time you can swiftly navigate around them because you’ve run into them somewhere during the process before.
You Become More Detail-Focused
With potentially thousands of typed characters opened in your coding program, one single overlooked typo could make the entire code break. It’s easy to overlook mistakes when there’s plenty of potential mistakes to be made.
Slowing down every once in a while for you to glance at what you just wrote can do wonders for you later down the line. Having a comfort level as a developer to double check your work while still maintaining pace is a talent that takes time to craft. But once error messages have resulted in a few long nights for you, you’ll start to naturally look at the finer details of your work as you go.
You Are Able to Sharpen Your Skills
Mistakes are commonly associated with being a bad thing. In the moment, it may absolutely feel like it’s nothing but negative. Out of frustration or confusion you may completely overlook the fact you are becoming better. Making mistakes, in any field, helps us learn and progress. With something like writing code, the smallest missed detail is often hidden and a bit of a puzzle to figure out how to adjust correctly. The steps of writing code, making a mistake, finding the exact mistake, fixing it, and testing it until it successfully forces you out of your comfort zone and tests your skills in real-time. The outcome is a working code and experience to add for you.
Making Mistakes Makes Better Developers
The headaches that errors might give you are always worth the struggle to overcome as a developer. Every time you write code, whether it is working the first time or sprinkled with dozens of errors, you are becoming stronger at the skillset.
There’s a textbook way of learning how to code. This way gives you the groundwork knowledge on programming languages and how to write them. But the textbook way simply gives you the starting steps you need. A large part of being a developer is taking this knowledge and expanding it through experience. There are billions of ways to get millions of outcomes. If you are able to blend the basic knowledge of a programming language with plenty of first-hand moments, then you have the potential to become a well-rounded and impressive developer. A part of that journey to get there has to involve error messages to test you and help you grow in the craft. So, the next time you find yourself scratching your head while staring at the broken code you just wrote, remember that it’s all part of the process and is helping you become the best version of yourself you can be.
At devCodeCamp, in as short as 12 weeks, we give you the hirable skillsets you need to launch your career in code. Giving you the knowledge of writing code through built out lessons that will give you a unique advantage of understanding the needed groundwork of a programming language plus how to navigate around the unpredicted with confidence. If you are ready to learn more, reach out today!