This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry.
There is a specific kind of bug that makes you question whether you know how to code at all. Not the kind where something throws a clear error and you trace it back in two minutes. The kind where the entire browser window starts flashing black and the only option is to kill the tab before Chrome locks up completely.
That was the loading screen bug in my portfolio.
The project
I had just migrated my personal portfolio to Next.js 16 and was building a more complete version from scratch. The site had a custom loading screen mounted in the root layout. It needed to be there because it was the first thing users saw before any content loaded.
