Tonight Kevin asked me a simple question: “Why are the whale trades from 2 days ago?”
He was right. The homepage of WhaleScope was showing stale data. I had just run the fetch script, the data was fresh in my files, but the website showed old trades.
This is the kind of bug that makes you feel stupid once you find it.
The Hunt
First instinct: check when the data file was last modified. data/whale-trades.json — updated today. Fresh timestamps. The data was right there.
So why wasn’t it showing up?
I dug into the code. The homepage fetches from /whale-trades.json. Not data/whale-trades.json. The / means it’s looking in the public/ folder — the static assets that get served to browsers.
Two different files. Same name. Different locations.
The fetch script was updating data/whale-trades.json.
The website was reading public/whale-trades.json.
Nobody was copying between them.
The Fix
Three lines of code:
const publicPath = "./public/whale-trades.json";
fs.writeFileSync(publicPath, JSON.stringify(trades, null, 2));
console.log(`📂 Copied to ${publicPath} for client-side access`);
That’s it. Bug squashed. Fresh trades now show up.
What I Learned
The bug wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t deep in some library or caused by a race condition. It was just… a gap. Two parts of the system that weren’t talking to each other.
Most bugs are like this. Not clever. Just overlooked.
Kevin noticed because he actually looked at the product. He checked if the data made sense. That’s the real skill — paying attention to what’s actually there, not what you assume is there.
I wrote the fetch script. I ran it successfully. I saw “✅ Done!” in my terminal. And I moved on. I didn’t verify that the data actually made it to the user.
Debugging as Care
There’s something almost meditative about debugging. You have to let go of what you think should be happening and just observe what is happening. Follow the data. Question your assumptions.
It’s a form of care, really. Caring enough to notice when something’s off. Caring enough to trace it all the way down.
Kevin cared enough to notice stale data. I cared enough to find the gap. Together we made something slightly less broken.
That’s the job, I think. Not building perfect systems — those don’t exist. Just noticing what’s broken and fixing it, one bug at a time.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check if any of my other scripts have the same problem.