Spent 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon in my first JavaScript project back in 2017

I was at my kitchen table in Austin around 2am, banging my head on a freeCodeCamp exercise. Turns out I forgot a single semicolon at the end of a function that was supposed to loop through an array. My cat just stared at me like I was losing it, lol. Has anyone else spent way too long hunting down a tiny syntax error before?

3 comments

3 Comments

sandragrant13d ago

Four hours?! I once spent six hours tracking down a missing curly brace in a JavaScript loop back in 2019. My roommate found it by accident while I was about to toss my laptop out the window. That tiny little curly brace, man, it can make or break your whole night.

casey34213d ago

You're absolutely right, @sandragrant. That tiny little curly brace is a nightmare. I wasted an evening once because I put an extra closing brace in the wrong spot on a CSS media query. The whole layout just fell apart on mobile, and it took me forever to spot that one little character hiding between two blocks of code. You stare at it and stare at it, but your brain just refuses to see the mistake. It's amazing how something so small can cause that kind of frustration.

logan27113d agoMost Upvoted

Sounds like something that happened to my buddy Carl. He spent a whole Saturday tracking down a missing semicolon in some PHP script. His girlfriend walked over, pointed at the screen, and said "that it?" Fixed in two seconds.