Typing Too Fast for Your Own Good

Sometimes it feels that our days are on tramlines. We might be going in the same direction each and every day but we don’t seem to have free will to really change anything.

The “staging is down” panic. The bug that only appears in a live demo. The rushed typing of a URL.

A disastrous tyop

You’re trying to be productive. Your Jira board is mocking you, your Slack DMs are on fire. You’re on your fifth meeting of the day. You type in “guthib.com” without thinking.

A white screen appears.

One sentence.

“You spelled it wrong.”

No logo. No menu. No page title.

The minimalism hits you like a gut punch.

The Webpage Side-Eye

This isn’t malware. This isn’t a phishing attempt. This is worse.

This is intentional.

Someone out there, some might say a troll, has bought a domain simply to shame you. They’ve turned a developer’s beloved site and converted a simple error into a shrine of humiliation, a monument of human error.

Whoever Made This, I Both Hate and Respect You

I’ve worked with some cold-hearted CI pipelines, but even they never judged me like this. Whoever made this site is playing passive-aggression to a level most of us could never imagine. They’re like the kind of engineer who leaves a comment in your PR that simply says “Interesting approach”, or asks in floundering interview “I’m curious to know why”.

This person could have monetized the typo. They could have sold it to a phishing farm. But no. They just wanted to remind you that you’re an idiot.

Respect.

The Universal Developer Experience

We all make typos. We fat-finger commands into terminal and hope we don’t accidentally delete production. We write froEach instead of forEach, spend 20 minutes debugging, then cry quietly into our mechanical keyboards. And sometimes, we spell GitHub wrong.

But this one? This is special. This is like typo-karma. You mess up, and instead of a 404 page or a redirect, the Internet shames you in Courier font.

It’s the kind of thing that reminds you why we have linters. Why we have code formatters. Why we have git revert.

There’s a Bigger Lesson Here

Honestly, this whole situation is a metaphor for modern development. We automate everything, yet human error always finds a way. We spend millions on productivity tools and still can’t avoid a spelling mistake.

Maybe the bigger message here is that our tooling can’t save us from ourselves. Or maybe the message is “Don’t type URLs while debugging with two minutes left before your retro”. Which means you should skip your retro.

Conclusion

If you’ve ever ended up on this page, don’t worry. You’re not alone.

You’re just like me. And everyone else reading this article.

But don’t expect sympathy. You spelled it wrong. Also you’ve left a memory leak in your code.

The Secret Developer is starting to believe that they are the memory leak.

About The Author

Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.

The Secret Developer never mistypes “github.com”. Except for that one time. Or the other three. But that’s it. Probably. I types gud.