The Developer Left. The Bug Stayed
A JavaScript PWA payment system that stayed offline-first also stayed broken, an offline sync bug that left merchants stuck on pending long after the developer who wrote it had resigned.
I was buying martabak, paying through Cashbac Beacon at an outlet with spotty internet. The PWA was built to work offline for moments exactly like this, so on my end, the payment went through fine. But on the outlet's side, the PWA still showed the transaction as pending. The outlet had to call customer support just to confirm whether they'd actually been paid.
Out of curiosity more than anything, I went looking at our support tickets afterward. I wasn't the only case. There was a small but steady stream of complaints, all the same shape: payment confirmed on the user's end, still stuck on pending on the merchant's PWA. The developer who owned that codebase had already resigned, so nobody was actively looking at it. It wasn't my project, and it wasn't my responsibility. But I could see the ticket count creeping up, and I figured if I left it alone, it was only going to keep growing.
So I opened up the PWA's JavaScript codebase and started reading through it cold, no handover notes, no context from whoever wrote it. Eventually I traced it to how the app handled reconnecting after being offline, the sync back to the server wasn't reliably updating the transaction status once connection returned. I put together a fix for it.
When it came time to deploy, the CTO stopped me before it shipped. This wasn't a small merchant-facing tweak, this code sat behind every merchant on the platform, and a bad deploy here wouldn't just break one thing. He asked me directly if I was confident this fix wouldn't cause bigger problems. I told him I was.
It shipped, and the pending-status complaints stopped. That fix kept running, untouched, for as long as Cashbac was still operating.
I think about this one because none of it was assigned to me. I just happened to be the customer whose outlet got stuck once, went looking, and didn't stop at "not my job."