[STORY] Hey Dev Genius, still debugging your love life or your code?

Last Friday night, while most people were out partying, I was at home — face lit up by the soft blue glow of my laptop screen, eyes locked on a stubborn JavaScript error that had been haunting me for three hours.

I wasn’t drunk on alcohol — I was drunk on syntax errors.

I had been working on a client’s e-commerce website, trying to integrate a payment API that refused to cooperate.

Everything looked fine — HTML, CSS, even my React.js components were rendering perfectly. But every time I hit checkout, boom — 500 Internal Server Error.

My brain was fried. My iced coffee had turned into melted regret.

Then I got a DM.

“Hey Dev Genius, still debugging your love life or your code?”

It was Jade — a friend I met during a coding bootcamp in Lagos. She’s one of those UX/UI designers who make Figma look like therapy. I replied,

“Both. But one has more bugs than the other.”

She laughed with a voice note, “Send me the repo link. Let’s solve it together before midnight.”

So we hopped on a Google Meet. My screen was shared, my VS Code glowing like a scene straight out of a Studio Ghibli tech fantasy. She squinted, clicked her tongue, and said,

“Your API key isn’t authorized. You’re calling the test endpoint with a live key.”

I froze. Three hours of debugging and she spotted it in ten seconds.

“You’re kidding me…”

“Nope. Even geniuses forget to switch environments sometimes.”

She was right. I fixed it, refreshed the page — and for the first time that night, the payment went through. I screamed like I’d just gotten a remote developer job at Google.

“It’s working! It’s working!” I yelled.

“Buy me dinner with that working code,” she teased.

I promised I would — once my freelance payment cleared.

Then she asked something that caught me off guard.

“Why are you still freelancing for small businesses when you could build your own startup?”

I paused. I’d been so deep in client projects — SEO optimization, website redesigns, and app development — that I’d forgotten why I started coding in the first place.

I said quietly, “Because I’m scared. What if my idea fails?”

She smiled. “Every line of code fails before it compiles. You debug, not quit.”

That line hit me harder than a TypeError.

So, the next day, I started working on something new — an AI-powered landing page generator that writes and designs custom websites for small businesses. I called it “PixelPulse.”

It took sleepless nights, dozens of Git commits, and enough coffee to power a spaceship. But when I finally launched it, something magical happened. The first user signed up — then ten, then fifty. Within a week, it went viral on Twitter (X) after a big tech influencer shared it with the caption:

“Built by a Nigerian dev who probably hasn’t slept in three days. Mad respect.”

I laughed so hard I nearly cried.

The sign-ups kept rolling in. The Google Analytics chart looked like a mountain. I thought I was living my dream.

Until I got an email.

Subject: DMCA Takedown Notice – Unauthorized API Use

Apparently, the “open-source” API I’d used for a key feature wasn’t so open after all. The company wanted me to pay licensing fees I couldn’t afford. My entire project was in danger.

I panicked. I texted Jade.

“They’re coming for my code.”

“Then we rewrite it. From scratch.”

That night, we stayed up till dawn — refactoring every endpoint, rebuilding features with new frameworks. She handled the UX/UI design, I managed the backend logic, and by sunrise, we’d saved PixelPulse.

We pushed to GitHub, deployed it again, and this time — it was all ours.

The next week, a local investor offered to back us.

We launched officially two months later. Jade became co-founder. I became CEO.

Now, we’re running a real tech startup — from our laptops, coffee shops, and sometimes, the floor of my tiny studio apartment.

Sometimes I still think back to that night. That single line of broken code that led to something real — not just in my repo, but in life.

Because in web development, just like in love, the best things come after the error message.