Software Development Blog

Weekly Newsletter Friday 12th Dec 2025 - Why Your Code Breaks Only When Someone Is Watching

Hi there, Rob here…

There is an ancient cosmic law in software development. Code that works perfectly when you are alone will immediately collapse into dust the moment someone else is watching. You can test it ten times, print logs, whisper encouragement to it, and everything behaves. Then you share your screen on Zoom and suddenly the app forgets how to be an app.

Developers have all lived this moment. You click the button that worked flawlessly two seconds ago and now it does nothing. Or worse, it does something new and concerning. The user interface jumps, the console screams, or the environment decides today is the day it will not recognise the config file you have been using for months. Everyone politely pretends this is normal. Inside, you are making peace with your failures as a human being.

The truth is far less dramatic. Modern systems are full of moving parts: local caches, stale environment variables, background processes, browser extensions, Docker containers that woke up in a strange mood, and the occasional dependency that simply refuses to load if observed. All of this creates a perfect storm where the tiniest difference between environments can cause behaviour that looks like pure magic, or pure chaos.

This is why developers build rituals around “it worked a minute ago.” Clearing caches, restarting services, removing and reinstalling dependencies, switching branches, or turning everything off and back on. None of these are signs of incompetence. They are signs of experience. They are what you learn when you accept that technology enjoys pranking you at the exact moment you need it to behave.

So next time your code breaks only when someone is watching, remember you are not cursed. You are just experiencing the natural humour of software. Fix it, laugh at it, and move on. It happens to everyone.

👉 Because software always works, until you show someone.

Rob & Jason
Dev Partners

PS. We are Dev Partners, helping founders and teams build software that behaves nicely. Most of the time.