The bug only surfaced when I demoed to the VP. A beautiful dark-grey screen, zero data, p

The bug only surfaced when I demoed to the VP. A beautiful dark-grey screen, zero data, polite applause. Rollback, coffee, open the trace. One line said userId: 1 . Production ID was 1 on my machine; staging hashed it into a1b2c3 . The component was waiting for digits, got letters, panicked, rendered null. I hard-coded the constant instead of reading the env var. Classic. The fix took thirty seconds; the humility lasts longer. Next time the demo gods ask for a sacrifice, I’ll hand them a config file - not my dignity.