Spent 3 hours stuck on a missing semicolon in my first JavaScript calculator

Wade Foster · 2026-09-29T17:20:02.71539+00:00

Last Tuesday I was building a simple tip calculator in JS and it kept showing NaN no matter what numbers I typed in. I checked my math like 20 times, rewrote the whole function twice, and even restarted my laptop thinking it was a glitch. Then I opened the browser console like a tutorial told me to and saw one line pointing to a spot where I forgot a semicolon after a variable. Added it, hit refresh, and it worked on the first try. Now I open the console before I touch anything else when something breaks. Has anyone else lost hours to one tiny typo like this? What was yours?

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