Finally got my first little web app running after a month of banging my head

Last week I finished a tiny to-do list app I built from scratch using just HTML, CSS, and plain JavaScript. It took me about 30 hours over three weekends, and I nearly gave up when the delete button wasn't working. I finally figured out I had a typo in one function name that was stopping everything. Has anyone else hit a simple typo that took way too long to find?

2 comments

2 Comments

johnthompson11d ago

Man I spent like two full days last month tracking down a bug where my login form just refreshed the page every time I hit submit. Turned out I had a button inside a form tag with no type="button" on it, so it was defaulting to type="submit" and reloading the whole thing. I remember staring at the console for hours and not seeing any errors at all, just feeling completely lost. My friend finally saw it in like 30 seconds when I screen shared with him. Did you end up adding any features to your app after you got it working?

the_elizabeth11d ago

Ngl the button thing reminds me of my friend Dave. He spent a whole weekend trying to figure out why his contact form kept disappearing every time someone clicked submit. Turns out he had the form action set to "#" and his JavaScript was calling event.preventDefault() wrong. The worst part is he had a console.log right next to the bug and just never noticed it was showing undefined. His roommate walked by, saw the screen, and pointed it out in literally 10 seconds. Dave was so mad he didn't code for like a week after that.