The 2 a.m. Debugging Special
It’s 2:07 a.m.
A product shows 120 items in stock.
Our system swears it’s 0.
Somewhere along the way, it briefly claimed 42.
The database insists there are plenty. The cache says sold out. The frontend store is oscillating like a ceiling fan with a bent blade. The local offline cache is basically a time capsule from last Thursday. And feature flags? They’ve split the timeline into alternate universes where customers either can’t buy at all - or get the last unit forever.
I’m not debugging software. I’m cross-examining witnesses. Each one says, “I’m the truth.” None of them are.
Blueprints and Daydreams
On the whiteboard, it was a thing of beauty.
Database at the core. A cache to keep it lean. An in-memory store for hot paths. A frontend store to normalize state. A local copy for offline kindness. Feature flags for safety. Analytics humming quietly in the background.
Every layer justified.
Every arrow clean.
It looked less like code and more like architecture digest: The Cathedral of State.
When the Cheese Started Sliding
Then reality arrived.
The cache expired wrong, declaring “sold out” while the database still had stock. The local copy thought 20 units remained, but from last week. Feature flags forked the truth - one group of customers saw “limited edition,” another saw “permanently discontinued.” Analytics insisted we’d sold 300 units nobody could actually buy. And the database - the so-called bedrock - was just another opinion, delayed by replication lag.
Instead of one clear truth, we had a seven-way standoff. Bugs weren’t bugs anymore - they were investigations into which version of reality we’d broken this time.
Every layer was a new witness.
Every meeting was a courtroom drama.
Nobody ever won.
These Are Not the Truths You’re Looking For
This isn’t just a rough sprint. It’s a pattern. Call it State Entropy.
Every new layer starts as a simplifier. Over time, it spends more energy staying in sync than solving the problem it was built for.
You don’t notice it at first. Then one day, half your PRs are “fix stock count again,” and junior engineers are afraid to ask which layer is “real” because the answer will start a fight.
The “single source of truth” isn’t real. It’s a mirage. At best, you’ve got several provisional truths, all decaying at different rates.
Sometimes Salsa Is Enough
Here’s the lens I use now:
- Every new state layer is a future sync bug.
- The fewer times you ask “where does this value come from,” the healthier your system.
Add a cache if you must. Add offline storage if you must.
Just stop pretending each one is free.
They aren’t.
You’re trading clarity for speed, or resilience, or UX.
That’s fine - just own it.
And once you’ve made the trade, keep visibility. You don’t need purity. You need to know which layer is lying when (not if) things drift. Observability beats elegance.
Sometimes salsa really is enough. Don’t make the seven-layer dip just because you can.
Bottomless Dip
By 3:45 a.m., I wasn’t debugging anymore.
I was spelunking.
Every layer promised the truth.
Every layer lied in its own special way.
The bug wasn’t in the cache, or the DB, or the store.
It was in the belief there was ever a bottom to this dip.
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