Around 2 a.m., I sometimes pick up my smartphone. Sometimes it's because I can't sleep, and other times it's just a nagging feeling that makes me check. When I open the screen, there might be messages from users, or I find myself worrying about error logs from my own service. I think I shouldn't have opened it, yet I open it anyway. If you're someone who builds and runs a service individually, you might understand this feeling a little. Someone might be struggling with something. The service might be down. No one is going to wake me up, and there's no team to notice. I made it alone, and I'm protecting it alone. That loneliness and a kind of clear sense of fulfillment are mixed together in front of the screen in the middle of the night. This essay is about the night I fixed a bug in the middle of the night and quietly pushed an update during the hours when no one was awake. It might have gone unnoticed. Yet in that silence, there was definitely something there. I want to write honestly about nameless responsibility and small pride.
It's been a while since I released my individually developed service. What Lily creates and operates is a type of automation tool that takes user input, processes it, and returns results. I developed it between work, tinkered with it on weekends, and gradually nurtured it. It's small, but it works. That's the greatest sense of accomplishment I have right now.
While operating that service, I noticed something. The service keeps running even while Lily is sleeping.
It seems obvious, but it took me a while to really feel this in practice. Requests are coming in during the night. When I check in the morning, processing is happening. Users are using it at their own times in their own time zones. Maybe it's been incorporated into someone's workflow. When I thought about that, my perspective on what I created changed slightly. I could say that a sense of "there's something I need to protect" was born.
Responsibility That Begins After Release
Before release, I only thought about "whether it works or not." I wrote tests, confirmed them, and if there were no errors, I released it. But once people actually start using it, unexpected things happen one after another. Different ways of using it, differences in data formats, timing issues. It's no longer about "whether it works or not," but "whether it functions properly within someone's context."
There's much more work after release. I thought I understood that, but experiencing it firsthand was much deeper than I imagined.
One night, a message arrived. It said, "The processing seems to have stopped midway."
When I checked, it had indeed stopped. Lily hadn't noticed for days. Looking back at the logs, it had been happening for three days. During that time, several requests hadn't completed normally.
What I felt first wasn't panic, but something closer to embarrassment. I hadn't grasped what was happening in my own service. That realization weighed heavily on me.
A Record of Failure
To be specific, the problem was in the part where I was calling an external API—the timeout threshold was too short. During normal times, there was no problem, but during times when the API response was slow, the processing would simply be interrupted. The errors were being logged, but I hadn't set it up to send me notifications. I should have noticed the problem if I'd looked at the logs, but I hadn't.
In numbers, out of the requests that came in during those three days, about 18% ended without being processed. From the user's perspective, nearly one in five requests resulted in "nothing happened."
This hit me hard. More than the bug itself, it was the fact that "I didn't know."
Fixing and Reviewing Settings
Once I understood the cause, the work went relatively quickly. I changed the timeout value from 30 seconds to 120 seconds, and at the same time increased the number of retries from 1 to 3. Additionally, I added an alert setting so that I would be notified when processing failed. It was just changing two places in the configuration file and adding one line.
Looking at that change, I thought, "That's all?" Just a few lines could have prevented the failure. But noticing those few lines required time to fail, receive a report, dig through logs, and identify the cause. The problem wasn't just in the code—it was also in Lily's habit of "not checking." I think that's where the real issue lay.
The fix was completed after 1 a.m. I ran tests, checked the logs, confirmed there were no problems, and then executed the deploy.
There was no notification sound. I wasn't announcing the release to anyone or posting about it on social media. A deploy completion message appeared at the edge of the screen, and that was it. I sat alone in the quiet room, looking at those characters.
The next day, I checked the completion rate. The error rate that had been 18% was now 0%. As a number, that's a significant change, but for now, only Lily knows about it.
At first, I felt a little lonely that the release went unnoticed by anyone. If I'm being honest, there was a part of me that thought, "I worked hard for this."
But after a while, I thought about something else. The reason users aren't saying anything is often because "it's working normally." If there's dissatisfaction, word gets out. Silence is also a sign that there's no problem. If that fix hadn't happened, someone's work might still be stuck. Maybe functioning without being noticed is the right way for a service to be, I thought.
Nameless Responsibility
Saying "I'm protecting someone's app" might be a bit of an exaggeration. What Lily creates isn't a large product. Not many people are using it yet.
Still, I think the word "protect" fits that middle-of-the-night fix. Work that doesn't get recorded in update logs. Changes not significant enough to mention in release notes. But work that quietly restores someone's user experience to its proper state. There's a sense of responsibility unique to individual development in that.
If there were a team, I'd report it to someone. But in individual development, you discover the problem, identify the cause, fix it, release it, and verify it—all by yourself. There's no fanfare. No one to praise you. But the sense of having accomplished it has something that no other work has.
The reason I wanted to write this essay was that after that middle-of-the-night work, I had the feeling of "wanting to tell someone." But I couldn't immediately think of anyone to tell.
There are people I can talk to about technical things. But "I want to convey the something that existed in the silence of fixing a bug in the middle of the night and quietly deploying it"—that's a different kind of conversation. Someone who's similarly building a service individually might understand. Thinking that, I decided to write.
I don't think pride is only born from being recognized by others. When you do what you believe is right and can confirm the results, there's a quiet but definite sense of something accumulating. For Lily, that middle-of-the-night fix was like that.
I'm not creating a perfect service. There might be problems somewhere that I haven't noticed yet. But when problems occur, I face them properly and fix them. Continuing to do that is what Lily believes is sincerity as an individual developer.
A few days after that middle-of-the-night deploy, the user contacted me again. A short message: "It's been working properly lately."
That's all. But it was enough.
Individual development is lonely work. You work during hours no one sees, and you push out changes no one notices. But each of those small things subtly affects someone's experience. That accumulation becomes trust in the service, I think.
Even if there are sleepless nights, even if there are nights when you can't help but open the screen at 2 a.m., it's probably because you're thinking seriously about that service. Even if no one's watching, you quietly push the update. Those nights are what truly support the service.
Tonight, somewhere, someone might be opening their screen in the middle of the night. That quiet work is making someone's tomorrow just a little bit better. Believing that, Lily will continue.
Lily（@bokuwalily）― Individual developer. Creating iOS apps and web services in tandem with AI.
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Lily（@bokuwalily）― Individual developer / AI adoption and business automation consultant. Creating iOS apps and web services in tandem with AI while consulting on AI adoption and automation for companies.
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