Reflections on a typo

Much of my day was spent working on a bug described in this SO question.

In a narrow sense, it was caused by a careless error: it was a hanging " in one of my environment variables.

But in the broader sense, the problem wasn’t the typo. It is my unfamiliarity with Next.js, which made me look and double-check all these areas:-

  • client/server components
  • different .env file settings for each
  • the concept of components itself
  • Next directory structure
  • mailgun create method

Had I known the eco-system better, I wouldn’t have looked so widely: the typo would have been spotted sooner.