There are only two types of devs in the world:

  • Those who misuse async/await like it’s going out of style.
  • And liars.

Welcome to the eternal battle between synchronous and asynchronous code—where your choices define whether you deliver a performant app or a sentient, bug-producing AI that crashes more than a Mac with 2GB of RAM.

Let’s break it down, with all the nuance of a DevOps guy watching you scp a file to production.

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Synchronous Code: The Reliable But Clingy Ex

Sync code is like that person who texts “where r u” every 5 minutes. It waits for your full attention, won’t move until you answer, and god help you if it gets stuck—everything else stops.

  • Great for control freaks.
  • Easy to debug—stack traces actually mean something.
  • But as slow as a junior dev copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow with zero understanding.

Synchronous is like standing in line at the DMV: nothing else happens until you finish your turn. It works, but dear lord is it painful under pressure.

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Asynchronous Code: The Cool Kid Who Sets Everything on Fire

Async is fast, loose, and has commitment issues.
It’s the rockstar that kicks off 12 background tasks, disappears for a beer, and shows back up with errors you didn’t even know were possible.

  • Perfect for APIs, I/O, file ops.
  • Super performant when not handled like a wet sock.
  • Also perfect for birthing race conditions, memory leaks, and broken dreams.

Every junior dev’s journey:
“Wow async is cool” → “Why is my app crashing?” → “WTF is the event loop?” → “I hate everything.”

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Top 5 Ways to Ruin Your Day with Async
1 awaiting nothing
You’ve seen it. Someone slaps await on a non-Promise like it’s seasoning.

await console.log("hi");

This is like putting on a seatbelt to use a blender. Stop it.

2 Not awaiting actual Promises
You forgot to await. Now everything runs, nothing finishes, and your server crashes faster than a crypto coin in 2022.

3 Using forEach with async
This one’s a classic. Nothing says “I don’t understand JavaScript” like this:

array.forEach(async (item) => {
await doSomething(item);
});

Enjoy your unordered chaos, king. Your loop didn’t await anything, but your error logs sure will.

4 Catching errors like you catch sleep on release week: not at all
Async errors are like silent farts. You don’t know they happened until everything smells like regret.

5 Using async where sync would work just fine
“Hey let’s make this utility function async because… vibes.”
Yeah, and let’s replace your if statements with AI-generated haikus while we’re at it.

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Sync Ain’t Dead, It’s Just Misunderstood

Sometimes you don’t need concurrency. Sometimes, the right move is to do things one at a time like a responsible adult.

If your operation takes 2ms, introducing async overhead is like hiring a team of consultants to change a lightbulb.

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The TL;DR That Saves Careers

  • Use sync when you care about order, simplicity, and not setting your app on fire.
  • Use async when you’re juggling I/O, need performance, and are emotionally ready for stack traces that make no sense.
  • Don’t sprinkle async/await everywhere like it’s garlic powder. You still need to know what the hell you’re cooking.

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Final Thought:

If your async code is harder to read than your company’s healthcare policy, you’ve done something wrong.

Write code like the next poor soul reading it is a sleep-deprived junior dev with anxiety and a looming deadline. Because they probably are. And sometimes… that dev is you in 3 months.

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Follow me if you’ve ever rage-quit over a Promise chain and cried into your console.log. Or if you just like your tech advice with a side of sarcasm:
👉 https://dev.to/hotfixhero