Every profession has its own dance with disaster. Physicians’ diagnosis, accountants’ audit, and writers? They proofread. But for us software developers, we engage in a peculiar kind of sorcery known as “debugging.” It’s a delicate art that lets us wade through the rivers of time, witnessing the world through the eyes of a computer, understanding our coded creations at every step.

The Friday before it all began had an air of triumph about it. I leaned back in my swivel chair and announced to my boss with a confident smile, “The geolocated photos feature is ready to launch on Monday.” I’d poured my coder’s soul into our React Native mobile app, meticulously testing it on Android and the iOS beta – it seemed flawless. It wasn’t.

But what I’m about to tell you isn’t just a story. It’s a descent into a week-long abyss from 2016, when the magical toolset for debugging turned its back on me, leaving me to navigate the labyrinth of my own code, blind. This is a tale of digital ghosts in the machine, and the relentless hunt that ensued to exorcise them. It’s also a story about good people.

After releasing the Android beta, I was surprised and confused: the images simply wouldn’t upload. A conundrum wrapped in an enigma, especially given the seamless performance on Android in the sanctuary of my local testing environment, not to mention the iOS beta that sprinted without so much as a hiccup.

I re-uploaded a version with improved error handling, but image uploads were failing without any feedback. You see, normally code screams its errors at you in red text – silence is the goal. Here silence was the problem.

Each new iteration of the app, laden with potential solutions, demanded an hour to upload to the Play Store before it could face judgment. Like clockwork, I uploaded new guesses while I prepared for the next. I was running out of ideas and under pr