Days in the Life of Mo

There comes a time in every developer’s life when the tools fail, the debugger mocks you, and your confidence collapses faster than an unhandled promise.

And in that dark, desperate hour, a familiar whisper echoes in the terminal:

console.log("why are you like this")

Ah, yes. The old faithful.
The debugging candle we light when all other methods flicker out.

The Developer’s North Star

Every generation has its heroes; Newton had his apple, Beyoncé has her fan, and developers? We have console.log().

It’s not fancy. It’s not optimized. But it’s always there, a loyal friend that doesn’t judge your lack of unit tests or that messy spaghetti function you swore you’d refactor “later.”

Sometimes, I imagine JavaScript itself sighing as we type:

“You could use the debugger, you know.”
And we respond,
“I could. But I won’t.”

Because there’s comfort in simplicity. In seeing your code’s soul spill out line by line in the console, variables, arrays, and occasional chaos.

It’s raw. It’s honest. It’s beautifully human.

A Love Story in Stack Traces

I remember my first encounter with console.log().

I was a junior dev, wide-eyed and terrified. My code wouldn’t run. The error message? Cryptic. The solution? Nonexistent.

Then someone leaned over and whispered the incantation that would change my life:

console.log("does this even work?");

And suddenly, magic.
Values appeared. The unknown became known. The chaos had structure.

That first successful log? It’s like watching fire for the first time. You stare at it too long. You whisper “oh” softly to yourself. You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to log everything.

The Science Behind the Simplicity

The beauty of console.log() isn’t in what it does, it’s in what it reveals.

Debugging tools can show you the state of your code, sure. But console.log() shows you the story.

It’s how you trace a variable’s journey from birth to betrayal. How you uncover the tiny typo that brought an entire function to its knees.

Even the greatest devs use it, yes, even the ones who pretend they don’t. (Looking at you, Stack Overflow commenters.)

Chrome DevTools, in fact, expands its console API for this very reason; with methods like console.table() and console.group(). Yet somehow, the humble console.log() remains the go-to. Why? Because it’s fast, human, and requires zero thought at 2 AM.

The Chaos Phase

Let’s be honest: console.log() has its dark side.

You start with one or two.
Then you sprinkle a few more “just to check.”
Before you know it, you’ve built a console orchestra; logging variables, conditions, and emotional states.

console.log("made it here");
console.log("still works?");
console.log("WHY IS THIS FALSE");
console.log("😭😭😭");

It’s messy. It’s chaotic. But it’s real.

And when you finally fix the bug? You don’t delete the logs right away. You look at them; a battlefield of print statements, and you salute.

A Toast to the True MVP

Here’s to you, console.log().
The unsung hero of hackathons, the midnight companion of tired devs, the duct tape holding countless projects together.

You’ve seen us at our lowest.
You’ve celebrated our breakthroughs.
You’ve printed our pain, literally.

You don’t judge. You just log.

In a world chasing the next shiny framework, sometimes it’s good to pause and appreciate the little things; the tools that have stood the test of time.

Because no matter how advanced debugging tools get, when push comes to undefined, we’ll always come crawling back to the one who’s been there all along:

console.log()… the real one true friend.

If you enjoyed this post, stick around for more tales from the trenches of code and caffeine; from your favorite dev girl who still whispers “please work” before hitting Run.