Main Breaks, But Composure Is Key

No one ever wants to be that developer—the one who breaks the main branch. It’s one of those unspoken fears many of us carry, especially early in our careers. And yet, it happens. To the best of us.

It happened to me after I merged a colleague’s pull request. Everything seemed fine at first, but soon errors started popping up, and the app just… broke. I was overwhelmed. I panicked. I immediately phoned my senior developer, expecting her to match my frantic energy or at least show some concern.

But she didn’t.

She was calm. Collected. Completely unfazed. I was in full-on chaos mode, talking fast, freaking out, already spiraling about what I might’ve done wrong—and there she was, saying, “We’ll fix it. One error at a time.”

Her composure felt surreal in that moment. I couldn’t understand how she wasn’t panicking with me. But instead of reacting to my panic, she grounded me. Her calm tone, her steady approach—it started to slow me down. And I realized something: she wasn’t just fixing the problem; she was helping fix me first.

In my panicked state, I’d forgotten the basics. I didn’t think to revert the merge or dig deeper into the logs. My mind was clouded by fear of having broken something important. But she gently walked me through it—reminding me that sometimes errors only show up after a few runs and that there are always options. We talked through how reverting the merge might affect the contributor’s branch, what else could be causing the issues, and how this might actually be a good time to restructure some of the codebase anyway.

She reframed the entire moment—from disaster to opportunity.

That shift in perspective was powerful. It reminded me that in tech (and in life), things break. It’s inevitable. What matters more is how we respond. In this case, her calm composure made all the difference. She didn’t assign blame or dwell on the mistake. Instead, it was all about finding the issue and fixing it together.

That experience taught me something I didn’t expect to learn from a broken main branch: that composure is a skill. It's something we don't discuss enough as developers. We're trained to debug, optimize, and ship. But staying calm when things are uncertain? That's something worth practicing too.

Honestly, I think developers should break things once in a while—safely, of course. Because only when things go wrong do we truly learn what we’re made of. It forces us to face our reactions, notice our habits under pressure, and build the emotional muscles we need to navigate a field where things will go wrong sometimes.

Breaking main that day taught me more than any clean deployment ever has. It reminded me that even in the messiest moments, progress is possible—especially when you have someone on your team who meets your panic with patience and says, “Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”

And that? That’s the kind of dev I want to be.