Everything worked. Which, in hindsight, was the problem.  I had just shipped a small backend change.... Tagged with debugging, programming, webdev, learning.

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A developer shares a debugging story about intermittent production failures caused by a missing environment variable. The issue appeared random because the variable existed locally in a config file but was absent in production, causing inconsistent behavior. The key lesson: bugs that seem random often stem from unvalidated assumptions about environment consistency. The fix involved adding validation and defaults to prevent silent failures.

The Bug That Made Me Question Reality for a Few Hours

<a href="https://env.t3.gg/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://env.t3.gg/</a> might save you.

I had the weirdest frontend bug that made my company loose 75K euros in 24h a few years ago
The issue only affected Safari Mobile.
Some of our legacy code handling our payment provider was doing an “await” on a function who didn’t return a promise.
Only on Safari mobile, this useless await silently breaks the call for some black magic reason I haven’t manage to understand

“ghost in the machine” scenario mentioned !!!

This is a selling case for containerized development to avoid inconsistencies!