The Infinite Loop That Burned an Entire Weekend

A cautionary tale about production debugging, sleep deprivation, and the humbling power of a single misplaced semicolon
Friday, 6:47 PM - "Just a Quick Fix"
It started innocently enough. A simple feature request: "Can we add pagination to the user dashboard?" Easy, right? I'd done this a hundred times before. What could possibly go wrong with a basic while loop to chunk through user data?
// Famous last words: "This will just take 5 minutes"
let currentPage = 1;
while (currentPage <= totalPages) {
fetchUserData(currentPage);
// TODO: increment currentPage
displayResults();
}
I pushed the code at 6:52 PM, feeling pretty good about myself. The weekend was calling.
Saturday, 8:23 AM - The Phone Won't Stop Ringing
My phone buzzed. Then again. Then it started ringing non-stop.
"The dashboard is completely frozen." "Users can't log in." "The entire app is unresponsive."
I rolled out of bed, laptop already in hand. The server logs were a nightmare—thousands of identical API calls flooding our database. My "quick pagination fix" was stuck in an infinite loop, hammering our servers with requests.
The bug? I forgot to increment currentPage. The loop was eternally fetching page 1, over and over, until our rate limits kicked in and everything ground to a halt.
The 36-Hour Debug Marathon
What followed was a weekend-long journey through the seven stages of debugging grief:
Stage 1: Denial (Saturday, 9 AM)
"This can't be my code. Must be a server issue."
Stage 2: Anger (Saturday, 11 AM)
"Why didn't our code review catch this?!"
Stage 3: Bargaining (Saturday, 2 PM)
"If I can just rollback without anyone noticing..."
Stage 4: Depression (Saturday, 8 PM)
Staring at the same 10 lines of code for the 47th time, questioning my career choices.
Stage 5: Acceptance (Sunday, 6 AM)
"Okay, I messed up. Let's fix this properly."
Stage 6: Caffeination (Sunday, 8 AM)
Fourth cup of coffee. The code was starting to make sense again.
Stage 7: Resolution (Sunday, 3 PM)
let currentPage = 1;
while (currentPage <= totalPages) {
fetchUserData(currentPage);
currentPage++; // The line that cost me a weekend
displayResults();
}
The Lessons That Stuck

1. Unit Tests Are Your Best Friend A simple test would have caught this immediately: test('pagination increments correctly', () => { // This test would have saved my weekend });
2. Code Reviews Aren't Just Formalities My teammates would have spotted this in seconds. But I was in a hurry, and "it's just a simple loop."
3. Monitoring Saves Lives (and Weekends) We now have alerts for unusual API call patterns. If something hits the same endpoint 1000+ times in a minute, we know about it.
4. The Power of Pair Programming Two sets of eyes prevent infinite loops. And infinite weekend debugging sessions.
5. Feature Flags Are Worth the Setup Rolling out pagination behind a feature flag would have contained the blast radius to a small test group. The Silver Lining That weekend taught me more about production debugging, system monitoring, and defensive programming than months of normal development. Plus, I got really good at reading server logs. Our team now has a "Infinite Loop Award" that gets passed around whenever someone makes a similar mistake. I was the inaugural recipient. The Takeaway Every developer has that one bug that humbles them completely. Mine happened to involve a missing currentPage++ and a very long weekend. The code was simple. The fix was trivial. The lesson was invaluable: respect the fundamentals, because they don't respect you back. What's your most humbling debugging story? Drop it in the comments—misery loves company, and we've all been there.