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I Made These Mistakes as a Junior Developer so You Don’t Have To
The three biggest screw-ups of my dev career
Ever heard the phrase “a developer always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street”? That means we’ve been burned so bad by mistakes — both ours and from others — that we don’t trust any situation, no matter how simple it looks.
We’ve all been there, right at the start of our career we think we know everything, and we can’t even realize that we don’t know what we don’t know.
It’s a common pattern and most junior developers go through it. You could even say that it’s a rite of passage and once we’ve gone through it we’ve gained the wisdom that comes from screwing up.
At least I know I have, which is why I thought I’d share that wisdom so you can skip ahead and avoid making these rookie mistakes yourself. But then again, there are very few experiences that provide such an adrenaline rush as screwing up this bad, especially if it’s on your first job.
SQL and the Dreaded Update Without a Where Clause
If you haven’t updated a production database without a where clause you haven’t lived.
No, no, that’s not me telling you to go ahead and do it.
But trust me, the feeling you get when you realize you’ve just sent the update statement (or even worse, the delete statement) out to the production database without the where clause is unparalleled. The moment you realize your mistake you want to go ahead and choke the network cable hoping the bits won’t go through. But then again, we all know that’s not going to work.
In my case, I updated a whole product table in the first company I was working for and renamed every single item for sale to “Merry Christmas.” I wanted to update ONE record but I did not write the damn where id = X part of the query.
Needless to say, I was having to explain my mistake to the CEO of the company ten minutes later. Lucky for me, my colleagues were able to restore a recent database backup and the mistake was corrected on the same day.
That being said, I never forgot another where statement in my life. So yeah, I learned my lesson.
