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💣 Debugging Hell: One Bug That Nearly Crashed Our Launch

Published: 20/06/2025 – Behind the Scenes Series #3

🚨 The Crash That Didn’t Make TechCrunch (But Almost Made Us Quit)

Three days before launch, everything was on track… until we realized that new users weren’t being saved to the database.

The app was showing a “Signup successful” message — but behind the scenes, nothing was saved. Users tried logging in again and were met with… silence. It was like they never existed.

🧵 How It Unfolded (A Real Timeline)

T–72 hours: Suspicion

One teammate said, “Weird, I just signed up but I’m not showing in the users table.” We checked. They were right. The auth record existed, but no user profile row.

T–60 hours: Panic

Our signup logic used a chained `.then()` call after a Supabase signup:

signup(email, password).then(() => {
  createUserProfile(email);
});
  

But `createUserProfile()` was firing inconsistently. Supabase didn’t throw errors. The DB just… didn’t write.

The Real Fix:

await signup(email, password);
await createUserProfile(email);
  

Switching to `async/await` gave us reliable control. No silent failures. No half-executed flows.

✅ The Fix & Our Safeguards

• Rebuilt the entire signup logic using async/await
• Added DB write confirmation + fallback if write fails
• Logged every step to console and DB for tracing
• Created test cases for every flow

😮 Emotional Impact

That night, our team worked till 3am. We considered delaying launch. We doubted our stack, our skills, even our idea.

But we didn’t quit. We fixed it. We hardened the flow. And we launched — with confidence.

🎯 What We Learned

• Logging is life. If you can’t trace it, it didn’t happen.
• Async bugs are the worst kind of bugs.
• Test “success” from the DB, not just the UI.

“Most launches don’t fail because of big bugs — they fail because of silent ones.”

🔜 Next Week

Coming Friday: “Building with AI: What It’s Really Like to Integrate GPT or Claude”

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