A Broken Map, a Bad Fix, and the Fallback That Was Doing Everything
I run a small, free tool called USFoodInJapan, a map that lets Americans traveling in Japan search a hotel, landmark, or neighborhood and instantly see every nearby US fast food chain and convenience store (konbini), with distance and one-tap directions. No account, no app install, just a search bar and a map. It's a static site with no backend, no framework, just HTML, vanilla JS, and Leaflet.js for the map layer.
A few weeks ago, someone sent me a screenshot of the map with a giant "API KEY REQUIRED" watermark stamped across every tile. That kicked off a debugging story with a twist I didn't see coming: the fix I shipped first didn't just fail — it made the site worse. And the real cause turned out to be something that had been silently true for who knows how long before that.
The setup
The map used two tile layers:...
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