In this video I share five of my biggest fears as a software developer (and yes, even as a FAANG engineer). I start with the most relatable trauma: quitting Vim. Back in college I literally couldn’t figure out how to exit, I tried random “:q!”-type commands, and it turned into this whole quitting-without-saving mess. That experience gave me nightmares and honestly pushed me toward IDEs because I just wanted to focus on coding, not fighting the editor. Then I get into the fears that actually make your life harder on the job: segmentation faults when you’re writing C (the ultimate “code sweats” moment), and the dread of getting a dynamic programming question in an interview. For a long time I tried to avoid DP because it felt like too much time for one topic—until an interview forced me to face it. After I finally studied it properly, I even got a DP question in a Google interview and solved it, which taught me that avoiding fear doesn’t fix it. I also talk about copy/paste mistakes during migrations (weird characters, off-by-one strings, template files where compilers won’t save you) and the most annoying one: bugs that aren’t reproducible. My takeaway is simple: choose your battles—avoid what you’ll never use, but if it’s part of the path (like interviews), you have to confront it.