Today Was a Supabase Fire Drill (With a Side of Progress)
Today was one of those "startup in the trenches" days—deep debugging, slightly existential, but ultimately productive.
The day kicked off with cryptic Supabase auth issues. Some sessions were vanishing after reloads, which is… not great when your product depends on users staying logged in. We dug into session tokens and ended up building a manual fallback mechanism. Not ideal, but it keeps things baseline-usable while we wait to see if Supabase starts behaving.
Also spent time reviewing our row-level security setup for multitenancy. Triple-checked policies—no room for cross-tenant leaks. Paranoid? Maybe. But bugs like that kill trust before you even launch.
On the brighter side, onboarding tests are finally rolling. Locked in our first users (Indie Hackers, naturally) and polished the flow enough to avoid embarrassment. It works… but doesn’t yet feel magical. Right now, it’s more Ikea manual than concierge onboarding. We'll take the brutal honesty from testers later this week.
🛠 Meanwhile, product messaging on the landing page is evolving. We're leaning into our strength: adapting to a developer’s existing stack rather than enforcing a new workflow religion. Still feels a bit generic, though. We need the copy to punch harder—especially before we open the early access gates.
Meanwhile, I sent a progress update email to a potential investor I’ve been warming up. Clean summary, upcoming milestones, soft ask for a follow-up call. No pitch deck yet—still keeping it real and personal. They’ve seen too many pitches; I’d rather have a conversation.
Also took a lap around an integration proposal from an adjacent devtools startup. Their SDK plays nice with ours in theory, but I’m wary of roadmap debt. Will grill them more thoroughly next week to see if it’s synergy or sunk time in disguise.
📘 What I Learned Today (The Hard Way)
How to stabilize sessions in Supabase when tokens randomly disappear:
- On auth state change, save refresh token + user to localStorage manually.
- On reload, check localStorage. If Supabase returns null, restore session via
supabase.auth.setSession()with saved values. - Monitor
onAuthStateChangeto detect future invalidations and handle edge cases like refresh token expiry.
Not bulletproof, but enough to stop session chaos until Supabase matures or we build an abstraction layer.
"Launch-ready isn’t 'bug-free.' It’s 'bug-aware, with plan B shipped.'"
💡 Final thought: Early onboarding isn’t a feature. It’s a feeling. That “oh this gets me” moment in the first 5 minutes is make-or-break. Designing for that is next week’s obsession.
Exhausted but on track. Still standing. Still shipping.
