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Frank Font
Frank Font

Posted on • Updated on

Oops Major Broker Broken

Please wait forever

All applications have mistakes in them. If you have not found them, you have not looked in the right places.

Yesterday my wife and I tried opening an account with a major online broker. You've heard of them. The interface popped up a spinner half-way through the signup and that spinner never went away.

We tried different browsers and different computers. Same result.

She called their support number. Brandon (not his real name) helped her try several things. Nothing worked.

Eventually, he went looking for a developer. This was later in the afternoon --- but he found one. Let's call him Jack (not his real name).

Root cause?

While she was doing that, I pulled up the website on my computer and recreated the endless spinner issue. I opened the developer console in chrome. There it was --- in red text; something "address1" on a null object.

I told Jack and he knew right away what the cause was. Seemed we ran into an edge case but because the message said "address1" he knew where to look in their database and quickly realized their code assumed an entry would exist, which for us did not.

He promised to fix it that evening and we are pretty happy.

Moral of the incident?

Bugs happen -- so leave some breadcrumbs to the root cause. People end up happier that way.

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