I Made These Mistakes as a Junior Developer so You Don’t Have To

The three biggest screw-ups of my dev career

Fernando Doglio
Better Programming
Published in
6 min readJun 11, 2021

Scrabble tiles that say “I am not sorry.”
Original Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash, edits by Author

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.

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Written by Fernando Doglio

I write about technology, freelancing and more. Check out my FREE newsletter if you’re into Software Development: https://fernandodoglio.substack.com/

Responses (10)

What are your thoughts?

I always test UPDATE or DELETE with SELECT first to make sure the count match with what I expected.

Great article! Thank you for sharing it! It's was funny. As you said, it's totaly OK to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them.

Great article, thanks for sharing it!