// Problem Log
A public notebook of things that broke.
Not essays. Each entry is a problem, an environment, the failed attempts, the cause, the fix, and how much afternoon it consumed. Failed attempts are included on purpose.
Discovering that my Qt UI is QML rather than Widgets
Time wasted: 1 hour
I opened Qt Designer expecting to drag widgets. The screen did not appear as an editable form.
Qt 6.x · Qt Creator · QML project
Qt installation taking much longer than expected
Time wasted: 2 hours
The Qt online installer froze around 50% while downloading components, with a progress bar that had given up being honest.
Windows 11 · Qt 6.x · Visual Studio 2022
RabbitMQ redelivered a message I thought I had handled
Time wasted: 2 hours
A consumer performed a side effect (an HTTP call) and then crashed. The broker redelivered. The side effect happened twice.
RabbitMQ · PHP consumer
HTTP 421 Misdirected Request caused by an incorrect Host header
Time wasted: 2 hours
An outbound API call from Laravel returned 421 Misdirected Request. The same URL worked in Postman.
Laravel HTTP client / Guzzle · Nginx · HTTPS
Laravel authentication error returning HTML instead of JSON
Time wasted: An embarrassing amount of time
An unauthenticated or validation-failed API call returned an HTML login page or a Blade error, not JSON.
Laravel · API routes / middleware · HTTP client expecting JSON
API works in Postman but fails in Laravel
Time wasted: 2 hours
A provider endpoint returned 200 in Postman and 401 or 400 from Laravel with “the same” payload.
Laravel HTTP client / Guzzle · Postman · third-party REST API
Different PHP versions between CLI and the web server
Time wasted: 45 minutes
php -v and a phpinfo() page from the web server disagreed. A package existed in one and not the other.
Linux · PHP CLI · PHP-FPM
Nginx/PHP-FPM 502 that looked like Laravel
Time wasted: 90 minutes
Production returned 502 or a blank page. Staging was healthy. Laravel’s log file did not grow.
Ubuntu · Nginx · PHP-FPM · Laravel
Redis data appears stale
Time wasted: 2 hours
Periodic spikes in database load, or a UI showing a value that had already been updated. “We use Redis” was true and unhelpful.
Laravel · Redis · PHP-FPM · MySQL