Skip to main content
Debugging Hell: One Bug That Nearly Crashed Our Launch

💣 Debugging Hell: One Bug That Nearly Crashed Our Launch

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

Illustration of stressed founder debugging a bug that broke user signups

🚨 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”

It’s not magic. It’s also not plug-and-play. We'll tell you what it really takes to get value from LLMs.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Behind the Scenes: How Generative AI Creates Music, Art, and Stories

When Machines Dream We’re living in a world where machines don’t just compute—they create. Generative AI is writing novels, composing symphonies, and painting pictures. But what’s really going on behind the screen? This post pulls back the curtain to reveal how generative AI actually creates —from writing a bedtime story to composing a lo-fi beat. Whether you're a curious creator or tech enthusiast, you’ll see the art of AI through a new lens. What is Generative AI, Really? Generative AI uses machine learning models—especially neural networks—to generate new content based on learned patterns. Trained on vast datasets, these models produce original music, images, and text based on user prompts. 1. How AI Writes Stories (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) Step-by-step: You give a prompt: “Write a story about a lonely robot who finds a friend in the forest.” The model (like ChatGPT) draws on its training data to predict and generate the most likely next word, sentence, or paragr...

PromptCraft Series #1 : Blog series on the Art and Science of prompt engineering

Welcome to the Era of No-Code Prompt Engineering New post every Monday 🧠 What’s This Series About? Welcome to PromptCraft — your new favorite blog series dedicated to the art and science of prompt engineering for no-code platforms like Lovable , Replit , and more. Every Monday, we’ll dive deep into how non-developers and AI creators can craft powerful, accurate, and elegant prompts to build everything from chatbots and virtual assistants to internal tools, automations, and AI-powered apps — no coding required . Whether you're a startup founder, solopreneur, educator, content creator, or just a curious explorer, this series is for you. 🔍 What is Prompt Engineering? Prompt engineering is the process of crafting precise, structured, and smart inputs (prompts) that guide large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to produce useful, high-quality outputs. But unlike traditional coding, prompt engineering speaks the language of humans , not machines. It’s like programming in plai...

PromptCraft Blog Series #4: Crafting Prompts for Chatbots and Conversational AI.

."> PromptCraft Series #4 – Crafting Prompts for Chatbots ✨ PromptCraft Series #4 "Crafting Prompts for Chatbots and Conversational AI" 🗕️ New post every Monday ] 🤖 Why Chatbots Need Special Prompting Unlike one-shot tasks like generating summaries or captions, chatbots must think in conversations . Respond in real-time Maintain tone and personality Handle multiple topics Remember context across multiple turns Good prompt engineering makes this possible without code or training . 📊 Foundations of a Conversational Prompt "You are [name], a [role]. You respond in a [tone] tone. Your answers are [length/style]. When asked [topics], reply with [behavior]. You must remember: [rules/context]." ✨ Example 1: A Friendly AI Tutor You are Elan, an AI math tutor for high school students. You respond in a calm and encouraging tone. ...