Bingo / 4 min read
App Dev Bingo
By Marion / September 15, 2025
🎯How many of these mistakes have you made?
If you’ve been building apps for more than five minutes, you’ve probably made at least one of these classic blunders. In fact, let’s make a game of it. Grab your mental bingo card and see how many you can tick off. Winner gets… well, the satisfaction of knowing you’re not alone.
The ancient battle cry of developers everywhere. You ship it, QA breaks it in seconds, and suddenly you’re Googling “how to reproduce a bug you can’t reproduce.”
API keys, passwords, or that one “temporary” token you swore you’d remove later. Spoiler: you didn’t.
Your app works perfectly… until someone in Australia logs in and your “daily” report arrives yesterday.
You needed a simple login form. You built a microservices architecture with Kubernetes, a custom auth provider, and a blockchain ledger for good measure.
You’ll “add it later,” but later never comes. Meanwhile, your colour palette is a nightmare for anyone with vision impairments.
One missing break statement and suddenly your CPU sounds like it’s about to take flight.
You know better. We all know better. And yet…
That quick hack you promised to clean up next sprint? It’s now a core part of your architecture.
Until one day, a security alert pops up and you realise you’re running a library last updated during the Obama administration.
Because obviously, the stack trace is lying to you.
🏆 Scoring
- 0–3: Rookie — enjoy your innocence while it lasts.
- 4–7: Seasoned Dev — you’ve seen things.
- 8–10: Battle-Hardened Veteran — you could write a memoir titled “It Compiled, So I Shipped It.”
Here’s a blank “App Dev Bingo” card — ready for you to fill in your own developer sins, inside jokes, or team-specific blunders.
🛠️ Fill‑In‑The‑Blank Ideas for Your Bingo Card
- “Forgot to Commit Before Pulling” — and now you’re in merge conflict purgatory.
- “Left a console.log() in Production” — bonus points if it says “debug pls ignore.”
- “Named a Variable temp and Never Changed It” — now it’s the most important variable in the app.
- “Pushed to main Without a PR” — because you were “just fixing a typo.”
- “Spent 3 Hours Debugging a Missing Semicolon” — and swore it wouldn’t happen again.
- “Built a Feature Nobody Asked For” — but it is kind of cool.
- “Forgot to Test on Mobile” — and now the layout looks like abstract art.
- “Used Tabs in a Spaces Project” — or vice versa, and started a holy war.
- “Relied on Stack Overflow Without Reading the Comments” — and inherited a 2012 bug.
- “Accidentally Deleted the Database” — but thankfully, it was staging… right?
- “Ignored Linter Warnings” — until they became 200+ errors.
- “Misconfigured CORS” — and spent the day in HTTP error hell.
- “Forgot to Handle Null” — and the app exploded in production.
- “Wrote a Commit Message That Says ‘Fix Stuff’” — future you is furious.
- “Deployed Without Running Tests” — because “it’s a small change.
Final thought: Mistakes are just proof you’re building something. The trick is to learn, laugh, and maybe… just maybe… not deploy on Fridays.
