Days in the Life of Mo

There’s a special kind of silence that fills the room when your code suddenly works.
Not “I fixed it.”
Not “I figured it out.”
No — that other silence.

The silence of:
“I don’t know what I did. But it works. And I am not touching anything ever again.”

If you’ve ever stared at your screen like you’ve just witnessed a small miracle, welcome.
You are among your people.

The Mystery of the Miracle Fix

Look, debugging is supposed to be a noble art.
A disciplined journey.
A thoughtful, step-by-step, Sherlock-level process of finding the exact line that went rogue.

But sometimes?

Sometimes you press save.
Or restart the app.
Or delete a semicolon.
Or breathe differently…

…and suddenly everything works.

No explanation.
No reason.
Just vibes.

Honestly, at this point I believe half the industry is held together by hope and Stack Overflow answers from 2012.

And before someone says, “That’s not how programming works,” please explain to me how restarting Visual Studio solves 70% of my problems. I’ll wait.

Psychology Actually Has Something to Say About This (Thankfully)

Here’s the part where I reassure you with science.

According to a paper from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), novice and expert programmers alike often solve bugs using opportunistic rather than linear strategies, basically meaning we jump around until something works. Not because we’re messy, but because the human brain doesn’t always process code sequentially.

Translation:
Your brain is… freestyling.

Another study in Human–Computer Interaction points out that programmers often rely on “external triggers”… small changes, refreshes, restarts; to jolt their mental model back into alignment with what’s actually happening in the program.

So yes:
Turning it off and on again is science.

Every Developer Has “That One Story”

Ask any developer, and they’ll tell you about their greatest miracle fix:

• The class that “just started working.”
• The API that was failing all day and stopped as soon as they called their senior to come look.
• The CSS that aligned itself the moment they gave up on life.
• The project that ran perfectly after they deleted a comment, for reasons no human has ever understood.

My personal favourite will always be the time I spent three hours trying to fix something, only to realise the issue was that… I didn’t press save.

Three hours.
For a Ctrl+S.

I had to sit quietly with myself after that.

But Let’s Be Honest… Sometimes We Do Know Why

Sometimes the fix works because:

• We finally stepped away and let our brain reset.
• We noticed a tiny detail we’d been skipping.
• We explained it to a friend or a rubber duck.
• We accidentally aligned our mental model with the actual code logic.

But other times?

Other times the universe simply says,
“Here, babe. You’ve suffered long enough.”

A Toast to Accidental Success

If you’ve ever fixed a bug you didn’t understand…

If you’ve ever prayed over your code like you were reviving someone in a telenovela…

If you’ve ever looked at a functioning method and whispered, “But… why though?”

You are not alone.
You are in the global developer community’s group chat.
And you are doing amazing.

Be honest, what’s your wildest “my code works and I don’t know why” moment?

Tell me in the comments.
I want the drama.
I want the chaos.
I want the stories that made you look around the room like you were on The Office.

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