Build Journey
At 5 A.M. I Stopped Guessing and Started Measuring Why My App Was Slow
September 2: measuring instead of guessing.
The Ford family · Josh, dad and builder of FamilyOrganization.app, writing up his build journey
Published Updated 1 min read
On September 2, at 5:27 AM, I committed a change to measure instead of guess. The connector had failed twice, then returned a 502 eighteen seconds after a call that worked. A retry succeeded. It was the fourth time I'd chased that symptom.
The logs showed six database calls succeeding, then nothing at all for the failed call, then the retry working. That call never ran the first step every call starts with, so it wasn't a database timeout. Every earlier fix had been right without being the last one, so this time I added a way to measure the cold start rather than assume it.
Built on September 2, 2026 (commit f2589b8). Written up on October 2, 2026 from my commit history.