Happy New Year! 🎉 | Your Code from Last Year Still Doesn't Work 😂

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Semicolon I Forgot Six Months Ago

So here we are.

It's 12:01 AM. January 1st, 2026. The fireworks outside have barely finished exploding, people are kissing their significant others, champagne is flowing, and somewhere—somewhere—a production server just went down because of a null pointer exception that's been lurking in your codebase since March.

Happy New Year, you beautiful disaster of a developer.

I'm sitting here with my third coffee of the night (or is it my first of the morning? Time is a flat circle when you're debugging), staring at my monitor with that specific glow that only VS Code at 3 AM can provide—you know the one, where your face looks like a ghost and your eyes are doing that thing where they forget how to blink.

And I'm thinking about you. About us. About this absolute circus we call software development.

Because let's be honest: we made it. We survived another year of pushing code, breaking production, fixing production, breaking it again in a slightly different way, and then documenting absolutely none of it.

We're still here. Still coding. Still Googling "how to exit Vim" even though we've been doing this for seven years.

And that, my friend, deserves a celebration. Or at least an acknowledgment. Or at the very minimum, a blog post written by someone who should probably be sleeping but instead decided that 12:01 AM on New Year's Day was the perfect time to have an existential crisis about JavaScript frameworks.

The Year That Was (A Horror Story in Twelve Commits)

Let me take you back. January 2025. A younger, more naive version of you sat down with a fresh notebook, a new mechanical keyboard you definitely didn't need, and a list of resolutions that would make even the most optimistic life coach say, "Hey, maybe dial it back a bit."

Your resolutions probably looked something like this:

• Write clean code this year (Narrator: They did not write clean code this year)
• Stop using console.log for debugging (Lasted exactly 4 days, 3 hours, and 17 minutes)
• Actually read the documentation before Stack Overflow (HAHAHAHAHAHA)
• Finish that side project (It's still in a folder called "NEW_PROJECT_FINAL_V2_ACTUALLY_FINAL_FOR_REAL_THIS_TIME")
• Learn that new framework everyone's talking about (You bookmarked 47 tutorials and watched 1.5 of them)
• Get better at Git (You still google "undo git commit" every single time)
• Exercise more (Your ergonomic chair doesn't count as exercise, but nice try)
• Sleep 8 hours a night (I'm not even going to dignify this with a response)

How many of these did you accomplish? And by "accomplish," I mean "think about for more than five consecutive minutes before getting distracted by a weird bug that turned out to be a missing semicolon in a file you haven't touched in six months?"

Yeah. Me too.

But here's the thing—here's the absolute beautiful thing about being a developer: we're not measured by the resolutions we kept. We're measured by the bugs we shipped, discovered, panicked about, fixed at 2 AM while our significant other passive-aggressively sighs from the bedroom, and then proudly committed with the message "fixed stuff."

The Midnight Commit

There's something poetic about coding at midnight on New Year's Eve. While everyone else is counting down from ten, you're counting down from a recursion limit. While they're popping bottles, you're popping stack traces. While they're making wishes, you're making API calls that probably should have been optimized three sprints ago.

I wonder how many of us are doing exactly this right now. How many terminals are open across the world at this very moment? How many developers are squinting at error messages that make absolutely no sense until you realize you've been staring at line 47 for twenty minutes when the actual error is on line 32?

How many of us have that one test that's been failing since October but it's commented out so technically the build passes?

How many "temporary" fixes have made it to production and are now permanent architectural decisions?

How many times have we said "I'll refactor this later" knowing DAMN WELL that "later" is a mythical time period that exists somewhere between "never" and "when the company goes bankrupt"?

We are a special breed of human, you and I. We chose a career where the problems are complex, the solutions are elegant, and the actual implementation is held together with duct tape, hope, and that one function from Stack Overflow that you don't fully understand but it works so you're not touching it.

A Love Letter to the Chaos

Dear 2025,

You were... a lot.

You gave us new frameworks (because we definitely needed more of those). You gave us breaking changes in patch updates (thanks for keeping us on our toes). You gave us that one junior developer who kept pushing to main (we've all been that junior developer). You gave us deadlines that made no sense, requirements that changed daily, and that one meeting that could have been an email but instead was three hours of people who don't code explaining to people who do code how coding works.

But you also gave us those moments. You know the ones.

When your code worked on the first try and you spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what you did wrong because that never happens.

When you finally understood that concept you've been pretending to understand for two years.

When you helped a fellow developer debug something and felt like an absolute genius for eleven seconds.

When you shipped a feature and saw real people using it and thought, "Holy shit, I made that. Me. With my stupid little keyboard and my caffeinated beverage of choice."

When you realized that imposter syndrome is just a fancy way of saying you're learning, and everyone—everyone—feels like they're one Google search away from being exposed as a fraud.

We grew. Maybe not in the ways we planned. Maybe not in the ways our project managers expected. But we grew.

We learned new things. We broke old things. We fixed some of those old things. We decided some of those old things were "features now, not bugs."

The Production Incident We Don't Talk About

Let's address the elephant in the room. Or more accurately, the error in the logs.

Every single one of us had That Day this year. The day where everything went wrong. The day that will forever be known in your memory as "The Incident."

Maybe it was pushing to production on a Friday at 4:57 PM (we've all been there, and if you haven't, you will be, and I'm sorry in advance).

Maybe it was a database migration that seemed fine in development but in production decided to delete every third user (oddly specific, incredibly problematic).

Maybe it was that time you accidentally committed your API keys and spent three hours rotating credentials while explaining to your manager that yes, you know about .gitignore, and yes, you still did this somehow.

Maybe it was discovering that "temporary debug code" from eight months ago is still running in production and is somehow critical to the entire application now.

Maybe it was realizing that the "quick fix" you implemented has cascading effects across seven microservices and you don't even know what three of those microservices do.

We've all been there. Standing in the metaphorical (or literal) server room, watching logs scroll by faster than we can read them, Slacks pinging like a dubstep concert, that one senior developer who always seems calm asking "so... what happened?" in a tone that makes you want to fake your own death and start a new life as a sheep farmer in New Zealand.

But you know what? You fixed it. Maybe not elegantly. Maybe not the way the textbooks say you should. Maybe with a solution that future-you will look at and go "what the actual hell was I thinking?" But you fixed it.

And then you documented it in a post-mortem that everyone read once and never looked at again.

And life went on.

Because that's what we do. We break things. We fix things. We break them again in new and creative ways. We're like artists, but our medium is chaos and our canvas is a Linux server that hasn't been updated since 2019 because "if it ain't broke don't fix it" (it is broke, we're just really good at working around it).

The Side Projects That Haunt Us

Can we talk about side projects for a second?

Not the ones you finished (lol, as if). The ones that are haunting you. The ghost commits. The repositories that haven't been touched since "Initial commit" seven months ago.

You had such plans. Such beautiful, naive plans.

"This one's going to be different," you said, creating yet another folder on your desktop. "This is THE project. The one that's going to go viral. The one that's going to get me hired at that company. The one that's going to finally make my mom understand what I do for a living beyond 'something with computers.'"

You set up the perfect tech stack. You spent three days deciding between React and Vue (you chose React, got frustrated with useEffect, and now it's just sitting there, judging you).

You made a logo. You thought about color schemes. You even created a README with emojis and everything.

And then... life happened. Work happened. That bug in production happened. Your brain happened, offering you a newer, shinier project idea that would definitely be easier and cooler than the current one.

Now you have a graveyard. A digital cemetery of good intentions. Projects with names like "NextBigThing," "AwesomeApp2," "ThisTimeForReal," and my personal favorite, "FinalProject_ACTUAL_FINAL."

But here's a secret: those projects aren't failures. They're learning experiences. They're proof that you tried. They're bookmarks in your growth as a developer.

That half-built authentication system taught you about JWT tokens. That abandoned e-commerce site taught you about database relationships. That "simple" todo app that somehow became a 47-file monster taught you that nothing in programming is ever actually simple.

Every unfinished project is a stepping stone to the developer you are today. The developer who's reading this at midnight on New Year's, probably with at least three unfinished projects open in different tabs, thinking about starting another one.

(Don't start another one. Or do. I'm not your manager. Live your truth.)

Coffee, Code, and Existential Dread

Let's talk about coffee. Or tea. Or energy drinks. Or whatever liquid motivation you're using to convince your brain that sleep is optional and productivity is mandatory.

We have a complicated relationship with caffeine, don't we? It's our fuel, our crutch, our best friend, and our most toxic relationship all rolled into one.

"Just one more cup and I'll figure out this bug."

Four cups later

"Why is my heart rate doing that? Why can I see sound? Why am I suddenly convinced I can rewrite the entire authentication system in an hour?"

But there's something sacred about that morning coffee and your IDE opening up. It's a ritual. It's a promise to yourself that today, today you're going to write code that makes sense. Today you're not going to need Stack Overflow (you will). Today your code will work on the first try (it won't). Today you'll finally understand monads (you won't, and honestly, neither does anyone else, they're just better at pretending).

There's something equally sacred about that midnight coffee, the one you're probably drinking right now. It's different from the morning one. The morning coffee is optimistic. The midnight coffee is knowing. It knows you're going to be up for a while. It knows you're three Google searches away from a breakthrough or a breakdown, and honestly, at this point, either one would be fine.

Things We Learned This Year (The Hard Way)

Let me share some wisdom I've accumulated over the past year, purchased at the price of dignity, sleep, and several years off my life expectancy:

1. "It works on my machine" is not a deployment strategy.

I learned this at 3 AM on a Tuesday when production looked nothing like my localhost and I had to explain to a very tired DevOps engineer that no, I did not test this in a Docker container, what even is a Docker container, are we still friends?

2. Comments are not for the weak; they're for the forgetful.

Future-me is not smarter than present-me. Future-me is dumber, more confused, and has forgotten why we made every single decision. Leave comments. Leave so many comments. Comment like you're explaining code to a golden retriever. Because in six months, you'll have the memory of a golden retriever.

3. The bug is never where you think it is.

It's never the complex algorithm you spent three hours debugging. It's the typo in the variable name. It's the API call you forgot to await. It's the CSS that has display: none somewhere in a file you haven't looked at since 2023.

4. Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow is fine, but understand what you're pasting.

I learned this when I copy-pasted a solution that worked perfectly but also inadvertently changed our date format to the Japanese imperial calendar. Do I know why? No. Did I fix it? Eventually. Do I understand what happened? Absolutely not.

5. Version control is not optional.

"I'll just make a quick change, no need to commit" is the beginning of every horror story. Commit often. Commit small. Commit with messages that aren't "fixed stuff" or "asdfasdf" or "I hate everything."

6. Your first solution is never your best solution.

But sometimes it's your fastest solution, and in production at 2 AM, fast beats perfect every single time.

7. Imposter syndrome doesn't go away; you just get better at ignoring it.

That voice in your head that says "everyone else knows what they're doing and you're just guessing"? Everyone has that voice. Even the senior developers. Even the tech leads. Even that guy who wrote the framework you're using. We're all just guessing with varying degrees of confidence and prior experience.

8. Taking breaks is not cheating.

I spent six hours debugging something that I fixed in ten minutes after I went for a walk. Your brain needs rest. Your eyes need to look at something that isn't a screen. Your body needs to remember it has legs.

9. The best code is code that works, not code that's perfect.

Perfectionism is the enemy of shipping. Ship it. Get feedback. Iterate. The beautiful, clean, perfect solution you're imagining? It'll never exist. And that's okay.

10. We're all making this up as we go.

Every "expert" was once a beginner. Every framework was once a weird idea someone had. Every best practice was once an untested theory. We're all just trying our best, learning as we go, and occasionally accidentally creating something amazing in between the disasters.

The Comparison Trap (Or: Stop Looking at Tech Twitter)

Let's have a real talk for a second.

You know that feeling when you scroll through Twitter/X/whatever we're calling it now, and you see:

• Someone who just got hired at FAANG at 22
• Someone who built an app that's making $50k a month
• Someone who "just finished" learning their seventh programming language this year
• Someone whose side project got acquired for millions
• Someone who claims to code 12 hours a day and also runs marathons and speaks five languages and meditates and has perfect work-life balance and probably cured a small disease on their lunch break

And you're sitting there in your pajamas at 2 PM on a Wednesday, Googling "how to center a div" for the thousandth time, wondering if you're even qualified to call yourself a developer?

Yeah. That feeling.

Here's the thing: social media is everyone's highlight reel. It's the product of survivorship bias and carefully curated success stories. Nobody posts "I spent eight hours debugging something that turned out to be a typo" or "I cried in the bathroom at work today because I don't understand async/await" or "I'm on my third rewrite of this feature and I still hate it."

But those moments happen to everyone. EVERYONE.

That senior developer you admire? They once spent two days debugging something before realizing their computer wasn't connected to the right database.

That tech influencer with 100k followers? They've shipped bugs to production.

That person who seems to know everything? They're just really good at Googling and pretending they knew it all along.

You are not behind. You are not failing. You are not "not cut out for this."

You're exactly where you need to be. Learning what you need to learn. At the pace that works for you.

Your journey is your journey. Stop comparing your chapter 3 to someone else's chapter 20. Stop comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else's highlight reel.

You're a developer. You write code. You solve problems. You create things from nothing but logic and syntax and sheer stubborn determination.

That's enough. You're enough.

The Bugs That Became Features

Let's take a moment to appreciate the beautiful accidents. The happy little bugs, as Bob Ross would say if he were a programmer (and honestly, he kind of was, just with pixels instead of paint).

Every successful app has them. Those things that weren't planned, weren't intended, but somehow became the thing people love most.

Twitter's character limit was supposed to be a constraint. Now it's their whole identity.

Instagram's filters were added to hide the poor quality of early smartphone cameras. Now they're an art form.

That weird quirk in your app that users discovered and started using in a completely different way than you intended? That's not a bug. That's user-driven product development. That's innovation. That's... okay, it's still technically a bug, but it's a bug that's making people happy, so we're calling it a feature and moving on.

I guarantee that something you built this year—something you probably thought was a mess or a compromise or "not quite right"—made someone's life a little bit easier. Solved a problem for them. Made them smile.

You don't always get to see it. You don't always get feedback. But it happened. Your code is out there, running on servers, doing things, helping people.

Even if that help is just making them slightly less annoyed at their computer. Even if it's just one small thing working correctly in a world where so many things don't.

You did that. With your brain and your fingers and way too much caffeine.

The Midnight Manifesto: Resolutions for 2026

Alright, it's getting late (early?), and I can feel the philosophical caffeine crash coming. But before I go, before you go, before we step into 2026 with our git repositories and our unrealistic optimism, let me offer some resolutions. But not the bullshit ones. Not the "I'll write perfect code" lies we tell ourselves.

Real ones. Achievable ones. Developer ones.

This year, I will:

• Ship more, perfect less. Done is better than perfect. Perfect is the enemy of shipped. Get it working, then get it better.

• Ask for help sooner. Spending three hours stuck on something doesn't make you dedicated; it makes you stuck. Ask. Slack that senior dev. Google it. Hell, explain it to a rubber duck. Whatever works.

• Celebrate the small wins. Your tests passed? Celebrate. Your build didn't break? Celebrate. You fixed that bug that's been haunting you for two weeks? CELEBRATE. You don't need to ship a unicorn startup to deserve recognition.

• Read the error messages. I know, I know. They're long and scary and full of words that seem designed to make you feel bad. But sometimes—sometimes—they actually tell you what's wrong.

• Take breaks without guilt. Your brain is not a machine. Your body is not just a vessel for transporting caffeine to your keyboard. Rest. Walk. Sleep. Stare at a wall for ten minutes. You'll code better after, I promise.

• Comment my damn code. Future-me deserves to understand what present-me was thinking. Future-me is an idiot who will forget everything, and present-me needs to help them out.

• Remember that every expert was once a beginner. When I feel like I'm the dumbest person in the room, I'll remember that everyone in that room once Googled "what is a variable."

• Ship that side project, or let it go. No more zombie projects. Either breathe life into them or give them a proper burial. My SSD doesn't have infinite space, and my brain doesn't have infinite guilt capacity.

• Be kind to other developers. We're all struggling. We're all learning. That junior developer asking "basic" questions? That was me two years ago. That'll be someone else in two years. Help them. The community is what makes this survivable.

• Remember why I started coding. Not for the money (okay, partly for the money). Not for the prestige (lol, prestige). But because there's something magical about making a computer do what you want. About creating something from nothing. About solving puzzles. About that rush when something works.

And most importantly:

I will remember that I'm a developer not because I know everything, but because I'm willing to figure it out.

12:01 AM, One Year From Now

Picture this: It's 12:01 AM on January 1st, 2027. You're sitting pretty much where you're sitting now. Same chair (probably needs replacing). Same desk (definitely needs organizing). Same coffee mug (definitely needs washing).

But you're different.

You've written thousands of lines of code. Some of it good. Some of it... character-building.

You've learned new things. Forgotten old things. Relearned those old things because you needed them again.

You've shipped features, fixed bugs, caused bugs, fixed those bugs, and then found new and exciting bugs in the fix.

You've had moments where you felt like a genius. Moments where you felt like a fraud. Moments where you felt both simultaneously.

You've Googled things you swore you'd remember this time. You haven't remembered them.

You've had victories. Small ones, mostly. A feature that worked. A user who said thank you. A problem you solved that you couldn't have solved a year ago.

You're not a different person. You're a more experienced version of the same person. You still don't know everything. You still feel lost sometimes. You still wonder if you're doing it right.

But you're still here. Still coding. Still creating. Still learning.

And that, more than anything, is what matters.

To You, Beautiful Disaster

So here we are. The end of this unreasonably long blog post that you've somehow read all the way through (thank you, genuinely, your attention span is legendary in this era of TikTok).

It's still 12:01 AM. Or maybe it's later now. Time is weird when you're reading blog posts written by caffeinated developers having emotional moments.

Your coffee's probably cold. Your code is probably still broken in places. Your side projects are still unfinished. Your imposter syndrome is probably whispering mean things.

But you're here. You made it to 2026.

You survived another year of semicolons and syntax errors. Of merge conflicts and Monday morning stand-ups. Of requirements that changed after you built the thing. Of bugs that only happen in production. Of that one colleague who keeps pushing directly to main.

You survived the late nights and the early mornings. The "quick fixes" that took six hours. The meetings about meetings. The coffee runs and the energy drink crashes.

You survived your own doubts, your own mistakes, your own worst code.

And you're still going. Still learning. Still building. Still debugging at midnight on New Year's because that's just who we are.

You're a developer. A problem solver. A creator. A person who looks at a blank screen and sees possibility. A person who refuses to accept "it can't be done" until they've tried at least seventeen different approaches and Googled the error message in three different phrasings.

You're stubborn and creative and logical and chaotic. You're precise and messy. You're confident and terrified.

You're exactly what the world needs.

So here's to you. Here's to us. Here's to another year of beautiful, broken, brilliant code.

Here's to the bugs we'll create and the bugs we'll fix. To the features we'll ship and the features we'll deprecate three months later. To the documentation we'll write and the documentation we'll ignore.

Here's to the 3 AM breakthroughs and the 3 PM breakdowns. To the coffee that's too hot and the pizza that's too cold. To the chair that needs adjusting and the posture that needs improving.

Here's to Stack Overflow, our silent teacher. To GitHub Copilot, our robot friend who sometimes suggests completely insane things. To that one YouTube tutorial that finally made it click. To the documentation that actually made sense. To the error message that was actually helpful.

Here's to the junior developers who keep us humble by asking the questions we forgot to ask. To the senior developers who keep us grounded by reminding us that everyone struggles. To the product managers who keep us employed by translating our technical babble into business value.

Here's to the code that works, the code that doesn't, and the code that works for reasons we don't understand and are too afraid to touch.

Here's to learning. To growing. To failing. To trying again. To copy-pasting from Stack Overflow and actually understanding it this time. To refactoring that function that's been bothering you for months. To finally finishing that side project (or peacefully abandoning it, both are valid).

Here's to 2026. A year of infinite possibilities and probable runtime errors.

May your coffee be strong, your code be clean-ish, your bugs be obvious, your deployments be smooth, your tests be passing, and your imposter syndrome be quieter.

May you remember that every line of code is a small act of creation. Every bug fixed is a small victory. Every feature shipped is proof that you can do hard things.

May you be kind to yourself when things break (they will break). May you celebrate yourself when things work (they will work). May you remember that you're learning (you always are).

And may you never, ever, EVER push directly to production on a Friday afternoon.

Unless you absolutely have to, in which case, godspeed, and see you in the incident channel.

Happy New Year, you magnificent, messy, magical developer.

Now go to bed. Or don't. I'm not your manager.

But seriously, sleep is important.

But also, I get it, that bug isn't going to fix itself.

But also also, it'll still be there in the morning.

But also also also—okay, I need to stop. This post is already way too long.

Here's to 2026. 🚀☕🐛

Keep coding. Keep creating. Keep being awesome.

And for the love of all that is holy, remember to push your commits.

— A Fellow Developer, Somewhere, At Some Time, Probably Debugging Something

P.S. — If you made it this far, you deserve a medal. Or at least a working test suite. Or at the very least, a nap.

P.P.S. — Your code is probably better than you think it is.

P.P.P.S. — But also, definitely write those comments.

P.P.P.P.S. — Okay, I'm really done now. Happy New Year. For real this time. I promise. No more P.S. sections.

P.P.P.P.P.S. — Okay ONE more thing: Git add, git commit, git push. Do it now. I'll wait.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. — Alright, NOW I'm done. Go forth and code. Or sleep. Both are good options. 💚

Published at 12:01 AM on January 1, 2026, with too much caffeine, not enough sleep, and exactly the right amount of chaos.

🎉 console.log("Happy New Year, { developers: 'all' }"); 🎉