As fast pace and exciting the life of coding is, there are times where the rut sets itself in; the worst part is that you never know how bad it’ll be this time. Alright, I want you to close your eyes and imagine this,(Don’t actually close your eyes, you need those to read) you’re running a maze, it’s super complicated but you’re way ahead of everything. You’re jumping when you need to jump, turning all the right turns and you finally get to the end. There it is, the finish line, you cross it but no lights go off, no gun shots, no applause; just you and the crickets. What happened? Why didn’t you win? You’re then told that you have to cross the finish line with a specific red towel hanging from your waist in order to win; But there are hundreds of towels in the maze. You are then told to go find it and bring it back.

This is like trying to debug some code that you’ve written. You finish everything and you’re feeling on top of the world, you then test it and your world crumbles down fast. Then you’re stuck with this giant, intimidating chunk of code that only you understand best; and you have to find a way to fix it.

Of course you’re going to go back and look for the big things, they’re just the easiest to spot. It’s almost never the big chunks, it’s surprising how often it’s something really small. I’ll give you an example. But the worst part is that the following really happened.

So, as you may already know, I’m a developer for Century Interactive; but I started as a call reviewer in the Humanatic section. This is relevant because in order to become a developer I had to learn to read, write and think code; Of which I had a very minimal amount of (Not remembered) experience from one semester. So I started learning on a great coding training website called codecademy.com. I learned quite a bit but things got really tough when Javascript found it’s way into my life, I remembered very little from that one semester but just enough to know that Javascript is what we were (supposed to be) learning.

So I was working on getting one of the lessons done for my training and I got to the end of it, it wasn’t easy but I did it. I made my final changes and clicked submit; It turned red and said I couldn’t move on until my code was fixed. So I sat back, looked at my screen, and flipped the table. Wait, sorry, that’s what I wanted to do. What I actually did is sit back, look at the screen and scan some of the code. Right off the bat, I don’t see anything so I look a little closer; I find nothing. I continue looking for about an hour, looking things up on Google, taking the hints, and the walk-throughs, everything; Nothing worked. So, it’s about the end of the day now and I go home for the night with the thought of what I’m going to do with that code when I get back to work.

I’m back in the office, sitting at that desk, having a good ol’ fashion staring contest with my computer. I lean over to my buddy Cameron and ask him to take a look(He’s going through the same training). We both look at it for a good 30 minutes, then he gives up so I go back to looking at it alone. I ask him what he thinks I should do and he tells me to ask the CEO of our company who has a lot of coding experience.

So I go up to the CEO and ask if he could help me with something. We walk back over to my desk and I explain the issue. He looks into it for about 10 or 15 minutes and says he doesn’t know, we both laugh and he walks back to his desk.

At this point I feel helpless. I’m frustrated, I swear I’ve grown a white beard down to my chest in the past two days. I just don’t know what to do. I’m staring at all the code, lost. But then, I come across something, something tiny, something so small I wanted to walk out that very day.

Turns out, I’d forgotten to put a semicolon at the end of ONE line of code. I’d been looking for everything except that. So if you take one thing from this, let it be to not overlook the small things.