Status Codes Cheatsheet

The brutally honest translation of HTTP status codes that every backend dev has internalized. 1xx codes are basically the server saying "yeah yeah, I'm processing, just chill." 2xx is the golden path where everything worked and you can actually ship that feature. 3xx is the server playing hot potato with your request, redirecting you somewhere else. Then comes the blame game: 4xx means the client messed up (wrong URL, bad auth, malformed request), while 5xx is the server admitting defeat with an internal error, database crash, or some dependency that decided to take a nap. The real kicker? When you get a 500 and spend 3 hours debugging only to realize you forgot to restart the service after changing an environment variable.