By a Man Who Once Tried to Fix a Bug by Yelling at It…

There is a particular look one acquires after spending nine straight hours staring at documentation. It’s somewhere between “prisoner of war” and “owl on methamphetamine.” I call this The Developer’s Glaze — a state of enlightenment where all syntax errors are personally offensive and every line of code you didn’t write is obviously the work of a lunatic with a personal vendetta against logic.

This is the natural habitat of the Mad Scientist Coder.

Now, I don’t mean the sort of coder who uses frameworks, tests, or (God help us) best practices. No, this is the noble beast who approaches every new feature request like Dr. Frankenstein with a spanner and a lightning rod.

Client wants a booking form? “Of course!” you say, your voice trembling with both excitement and caffeine. You open the documentation for a third-party calendar API written in broken English and riddled with helpful phrases like “To auth, you must reauth the auth using authkey in header not in head.”

You nod wisely. You don’t know what it means, but the code stirs something ancient in your bones. You squint at it the way Indiana Jones squints at ancient runes, hoping not to unleash a curse or a 500 Internal Server Error.

Now comes the fun part: Instinct.

The Mad Scientist Approach is built entirely on human instinct, the sort you might use to disarm a bomb or guess the King’s favourite biscuit. You copy, you paste, you tweak. You remove lines of code not because they’re wrong, but because they feel wrong. Sometimes, you delete entire functions purely out of spite. This is known in professional circles as refactoring.

Your test environment is a live website, and your debugging strategy is to stare at the screen until the bug becomes so uncomfortable it just leaves out of sheer social awkwardness.

At some point, the new feature sort of works. It doesn’t behave as it should, but it does behave consistently, which is almost better. You deploy it with a flourish, declaring it done in the same tone you might use to announce that a wild animal has been successfully trapped in the kitchen using only a broom and blind faith.

Later, someone asks how you achieved the final result.

You narrow your eyes and say, “Through experimentation, recklessness, and a complete disregard for sanity.”

They nod. They understand. They too are a Mad Scientist Coder.

And so we carry on — breaking things, building them back up, and occasionally shouting “It’s alive!” when a button finally works.

Documentation may be our holy text, but instinct… instinct is our dark magic.

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Next time: Why “Just Try It and See What Happens” is the most underrated QA methodology in modern software engineering.