You’re a Real Software Developer Only If…

Uff, I’m finally done with my talk at jsDay 2026! And honestly? It went at least good. People showed...

Uff, I’m finally done with my talk at jsDay 2026!

And honestly? It went at least good. People showed up, they asked questions… what more could you want? 😄

During the talk, I felt like I was among my people — that beautiful species of nerds who laugh at programming jokes without needing them explained ❤️

I’ll write a proper recap next week, but for now, a quick story from yesterday.

I was sitting at the airport in Munich. For five hours.

Not exactly the plan.

I was supposed to have a one-hour layover and be enjoying the Italian sun by 5 PM. Instead, my first flight got delayed, I missed the connection, and… well.

Luckily, there was another flight later that day. Six hours later…

But as we say in Poland: every cloud has a silver lining.

I used that time to add fallbacks for absolutely EVERYTHING in my presentation. (Yes, I even installed service workers last minute — and it saved me later like crazy 🔥)

I also definitely hit my daily cardio goal trying to navigate that absurdly large airport.

And when boredom finally kicked in, I started writing this post.

This is also a small tribute to @hadil and her brilliant post: You're the real JavaScript Developer Only If.... I’ve wanted to write something like this for months. And since I haven’t written anything in this style in a while… I’ve earned it 😄

You’re a real developer only if:

💥 You’ve broken production at least once

There’s even a Polish saying:

“Kto produkcji nie wyebie, ten nie zazna szczęścia w niebie”*

Loosely translated into English:

“If prod you’ve never slain, dev heaven you won’t gain.” 😄

🐛 You’ve fixed a bug… completely by accident

Something sat in TODO for months (or years), and suddenly… it just works.

Or you changed something totally unrelated and magically fixed another issue.

No idea why. No idea how. You just slowly back away and hope it stays that way.

🤯 At least once during debugging you thought:

“This makes absolutely no sense.”

And instead of stepping back and thinking… you added more logs.

And then more logs.

And then one final console.log("WHAT IS GOING ON").

🧨 You were afraid to touch code that looks terrible… but works

Because deep down you know:

“This is held together by vibes and legacy decisions.”

And if you touch it, something completely unrelated will break.

💻 You wrote code that worked perfectly locally…

…and exploded in production

• different environment
• missing env variable
• timezone issues
• race conditions
• or just… vibes again

🗑️ You accidentally dropped a database

Maybe not the whole thing. Maybe just a table. Maybe just half the data.

But still. Character development.

🖥️ You’ve said:

“It works on my machine.”

And you meant it. With full confidence.

🔄 You blamed the backend (if you’re frontend)…

or the frontend (if you’re backend)

Preferably both, within the same debugging session.

🧠 During one debugging session you thought:

• first: “I’m an idiot.”
• then: “Wait… I’m a genius.”

Sometimes multiple times in a loop.

Final verdict

If you answered “yes” to most of these: 👉 congratulations, you’re definitely a software developer.

If about half: 👉 you just need more experience.

If less than two: 👉 what are you even doing here? Go write more code 😄

Your turn 👇

What would YOU add to this list?

Because I’m 100% sure we’ve all got at least one story that would fit perfectly here 😄