I've been haunted for years by the issues that pop up unexpectedly in production environments. You go through all the right steps: you think you haven't messed with anything, you write tests (okay, maybe not always), and then, out of nowhere, a bug gets reported by a user! It's frustrating when you have features that appear to work perfectly in staging but then fail in production, leading to embarrassing issues like broken navigation or feature flags that weren't set correctly. Sometimes, you can even blame third-party services, like Auth0 going down or weird behavior from payment processors. I've set up monitoring tools like Datadog and Sentry, but not even they catch everything. What's worse is when users report these problems days after they occur. Have any of you experienced production-only bugs? How did you discover them, and what fixes did you implement?
5 Answers
Yeah, I've definitely run into that issue. Once, I had a situation where no APIs worked because the test environment secrets accidentally made their way into production. Super frustrating! Also, I once had a production-only bug caused by different drivers in the database, which was tricky. Just keep an eye on your environment settings to prevent that from happening.
I used to run into these problems all the time until I switched to test-driven development. It really changed the game for me!
Have you worked in a fast-paced startup environment where things change constantly?
I once debugged a database issue that stemmed from different database drivers using different column names for a calculated field, which left production looking for the wrong thing. It sneaked up on us because everything was fine in dev. We had to dig quite deep to unravel that one!
That’s so sneaky! How did you finally pinpoint that there was an issue with the drivers?
Production-only bugs really test your debugging skills. One thing I’ve learned is to add copious logging to try to catch bugs in real-time. When it happens, replicate the user's actions as closely as possible. Sometimes creating a hidden admin section for debugging helps too—something that won't be easily accessed by others while you sort things out.
I remember a time when we shipped software to municipalities on CDs. Everything seemed fine until we got back the survey data and found that the date formatting was messed up. It stored dates as MM/DD/YYYY instead of DD/MM/YYYY, which led to all sorts of confusion. We had to push an update quickly but not before some major headaches for our users. Sometimes these strange bugs can create a real mess!
Wow, that's rough! It’s amazing how something small can snowball into a big issue.
Yeah, dealing with date formats can be a nightmare, especially when you have international users.
Ugh, I totally hate when that happens! Glad I'm not alone.