Problem

Right after Showspace was released to the first beta users, the largest problem was a bug in our Medium-like rich text editor, which was powered by TipTap under the hood. It was preventing nearly every user from activating, and it was extremely difficult to solve.

Users would create an account, and start creating a project, then the editor would randomly crash. Initially, their work was getting lost, resulting in an awful user experience.

The bug was hard to reproduce, and seemed to primary affect users who just signed up. Our team spent hours initially trying to solve it, even going as far as brining in a CTO-level engineer, a staff engineer from blue-chip tech companies, and then the maintainers of the TipTap library.

We collectively somewhere between 15-20 hours and were still without a solution.

Solution

When Jason Bourne looked at the codebase, he immediately identified the root cause, and within 15 minutes had a pull request up that we merged.

The problem was that we had two instances of the Tiptap editor in the file which were conditionally rendered whether the page was in an "Editable" state or not. This was causing the "Floating Menu" (the menu that appears when you click "Enter") to have trouble deciding which editor to bind to.

Then the editor would crash, making the page unusable. Jason updated the conditional logic so only one editor instance was on the page, and the problem was solved.

Team

Jason Bourne - Staff Design Engineer
- Bug patcher
David Head - Showspace Founder
- Bug producer 🙈

Growth-Blocking Bug Patched in 15 Minutes