❯ tail -f /var/log/field_notes.log
Field notes
Investigations written the way they happened: symptom, evidence, refuted hypotheses, root cause. No tutorials, no listicles — autopsies.
· 4 min read · forensics · node.js · local-dev · debugging
The zombie on port 3000: a restart that never happened
A green build, a freshly 'restarted' server, and every route answering 404. Nobody had broken anything — we were just interrogating a corpse. A short forensic on orphaned processes, and why 'I restarted it' is a claim that needs evidence.
· 7 min read · forensics · next.js · vercel · rsc
The navigation that secretly reloaded: a Vercel RSC forensic
Every page worked, every link navigated, and every single client-side navigation was quietly failing with a 404. A forensic on the gap between 'it works' and 'it does what you built' — and on bugs that only exist in production's body, never on your machine.
· 8 min read · forensics · incident-response · methodology · debugging
The forensic method: six phases for production incidents
Production debugging fails when it runs on intuition: the loudest hypothesis wins and the evidence evaporates. This is the six-phase method I use instead — data before theories, and no hypothesis survives without surviving an attempt to kill it.
· 6 min read · forensics · next.js · windows · debugging
The phantom build failure: when a capital letter takes down your Next.js build
Every page of a fully static site failed to prerender with an invariant blaming Next.js itself. The framework was innocent. A forensic walkthrough of refuting the obvious suspects until a single character confessed.