2
lucadev
1y

How do I overcome the fear of failure as a developer? I know that failures are a daily thing in the life of a developer but I'm severely afraid to mess things up. My colleague explained something to me that also involves making changes to the database but I'm really afraid to make mistakes. How does one overcome that initial fear? And did anyone experience the same as a junior developer?

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  • 4
    Most mistakes and failures don’t cause any harm. Just fix it afterwards and it’s ok.

    For the others that can cause harm, it’s important to make sure that there is a system that does backups (e.g. for the database) automatically.

    And always have at least a dev system alongside with the production system so that if you fuck up on the dev, no harm is made to prod.

    When you have all those things then you can make mistakes without worrying about something severe happening.
  • 2
    Well first make sure there is a backup available if not make one

    You will make mistakes and this is not wrong, but you have to learn from them! Don't be afraid just make sure that you have the backup :D
  • 2
    Accept that you're a failure and own it. Then there's nothing left to fear.
  • 2
    As @Lensflare says: "always have at least a dev system alongside" . That is crucial.

    You work on the dev site, make any mistakes there, then, when you know it works, you copy/upload/transfer to live. Crucially, for code, use a version control system with regular commits so you can revert a small way if something breaks and you don't immediately know why. For your test database, export a dump of the structure before you start. In time, you'll come to be more confident and all of this will be second nature. I like to use Navicat for synchronising databases (structure and data) between live and test - it works very well. Generally, I synch structural changes to live from test, bring test data in from live to test.

    Setting up a test environment takes a bit of time, but it is utterly worth it and, frankly, almost always the only professional way to work.
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