How Mocking Missing APIs Turned a Blocked Junior Dev's Week Into a Win

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A frontend developer starting a new job found themselves unable to progress when the .NET engineer they depended on left for a week-long vacation before writing the required API endpoints. Drawing on advice from his grandfather — a factory shop steward who believed no obstacle was insurmountable — the developer chose not to wait idle. Instead, he built mock endpoints to simulate the missing backend, allowing frontend work to continue uninterrupted. When the backend engineer returned and delivered the real endpoints, integration was straightforward since the groundwork was already laid. The developer was praised and asked to teach the approach to colleagues, illustrating how mocking dependencies is a practical, widely applicable technique for unblocking parallel development.

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