The First Website Broke

We shipped the first OpenBox website quickly and we were proud of it. It had the server directory, the join links, the rules pages. It looked the part. Then it broke, and we did not notice for longer than we should have.

The failure was in the build pipeline. A package we were using had a minor version bump that changed a behavior we were relying on. We had not pinned our dependencies tightly, so the next deploy pulled the new version automatically. The build failed silently. Cloudflare Pages returned the last successful deploy for a bit, then started serving errors.

Anyone clicking our links during that window hit a broken page. We had no uptime monitoring, no build status alerts, no fallback. We found out because someone in the community mentioned it in the server.

When we finally dug into the issue, it was not just the package version. The build config had a path alias that only worked correctly in our local environment. The CI environment resolved it differently and failed. We had never actually tested a clean build from scratch. We had only ever deployed from our own machines where everything was already set up.

Fixing it took a few hours. But by that point, we had already decided the first site had to go. The codebase had too many workarounds stacked on each other. It was faster to rebuild than to keep patching.

A few things we do now that we did not do then: dependency versions are pinned and updated deliberately, every deploy runs a clean build in a controlled environment, and we have monitoring that actually alerts when something goes down.

Shipping fast is the right call. Shipping without any observability is just hoping nothing breaks.