Ideas, Experiments, and Lessons Learned
Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, doubting everything I knew about programming. And you know what the problem was? A single character. A missing letter. A typo. The Scene It was a Friday afternoon. Simple task — fetch some data from an API, process it, save to…
The Bug That Made Me Feel Stupid Three hours. That’s how long I stared at my screen, questioning my career choices, before finding the fix. One line. That’s all it took. Let me tell you what happened. What I Was Building I was working on a simple API endpoint that fetched user data from our…
It happened on a Tuesday afternoon I was 23 years old, fresh out of my first startup, and confident. Too confident. We had a small team — me, a frontend dev, and the founder. I was handling everything backend, and honestly, I thought I had it figured out. We were migrating our PostgreSQL database to…
It was 2 AM. I was half-asleep, running what I thought was a local database cleanup script. I was wrong. I was connected to production. The Mistake I had a simple script to delete old test records from my local database. Something like: DELETE FROM users WHERE created_at < '2024-01-01' AND environment = 'test'; The...
It was 2 AM when my phone rang. Our production server was down for the third time that week. I pulled up the logs, checked the metrics, and saw the same pattern: memory usage climbing steadily until the OOM killer stepped in and terminated our Node.js process. The Symptoms Let me paint the picture: Restarted…
It was 2 AM. My phone buzzed. Our monitoring system was screaming. I had just run a migration script that was supposed to clean up old records. Instead, it deleted half our user table. Here is what happened and what I learned. The Setup We had a table with inactive users. The business wanted to…
It was 2 AM when my phone buzzed. Not a notification — an alert. The kind you dread. Our main API was down. Users couldn’t log in. Payments were failing. And I was the only developer awake. The First 10 Minutes My heart rate spiked. I SSH’d into the server, ran some commands, saw nothing…
It was 2 AM when my phone started buzzing. Not once, not twice — it went full siren mode. Our main API was timing out, and the error messages were everywhere. Here’s what happened. The Setup We had a simple users table. Nothing fancy — just the usual stuff: id, email, name, created_at. We needed…
It was 2:14 AM when my phone started buzzing. Not the normal notification buzz — the panic buzz. Our main API was returning 500 errors across the board. I stumbled out of bed, opened my laptop, and saw it: our PostgreSQL database had ground to a complete halt. What Was Happening The dashboard showed CPU…
It Started With a Simple Request Monday morning. Coffee in hand. I open my laptop ready to knock out some tickets. Then I see it — a Slack message from our QA team: Hey, the user profile endpoint is returning 500 errors for some users. Easy fix, I thought. Probably some null pointer or missing…