Error Handling Seatbelt

Why Error Handling Is Like Wearing a Seatbelt

Error handling is what separates professional code from “it works on my machine” code. It’s like wearing a seatbelt - 99% of the time it does nothing, but that 1% is really important. At Juniper, I debugged a system that had no error handling, so when things went wrong, it just continued with garbage data like nothing happened. It was like a GPS that, when it lost signal, just kept giving you the last direction forever.

The worst error handling is catching everything and doing nothing. try { everything } catch (Exception e) { // TODO }. That TODO is a promise to your future self that you’re never going to keep. It’s like having a smoke detector that you’ve disabled because it kept beeping. Sure, it’s quieter now, but you’ve traded annoying false positives for missing actual fires.

My favorite error handling antipattern was when someone wrapped every single line in its own try-catch block. The code looked like it was wearing armor made of exception handlers. If anything went wrong, it would just skip that line and continue, turning what should have been a clear failure into a subtle corruption that took weeks to track down. It was like a recipe that said “if you don’t have eggs, just skip that step” for every ingredient. You’d end up with something, but it definitely wasn’t what you intended to make.