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The daily log — what shipped, what broke, and what it taught me.

UpdatesAug 5, 20266 min read

The month my website turned into a place

I set out to update a portfolio and ended up building a neighbourhood — a feed people post to, games people invent, and a writing engine that pays for itself. Here's the story, not the changelog.

UpdatesAug 4, 20261 min read

One line, everywhere

A single fix all day: making the follow button tell the same truth on every screen. The smallest kind of bug, and the kind that quietly teaches you the most.

UpdatesAug 3, 20262 min read

The difference between working and finished

A quiet polish day on NNAWCA. A verified seal with scalloped edges, reactions in the right order, the marketing pages a real organisation needs. Small things — which is exactly why they matter.

UpdatesAug 2, 20262 min read

The day a project got its real name

I'd been calling it The Parliament as a placeholder. Today it became NNAWCA everywhere — and renaming a thing turned out to be the least of what the day taught me about trust.

UpdatesAug 1, 20262 min read

The boring day that holds everything else up

No new screen anyone will screenshot. Just the plumbing a real product can't live without — money that reconciles, email that arrives, jobs that run, errors you can actually see.

UpdatesJul 31, 20262 min read

The day I stopped faking things

Across three codebases, the same move: rip out the pretend version. A mock feed became an honest waitlist, a hidden 404 gave twenty-four posts back, and a whole app got its locks checked.

UpdatesJul 31, 20265 min read

Three codebases, one bug: permission said no, quietly

A day spent across shubhamdatarkar, The Parliament and WeCos, and every real problem turned out to be the same one wearing different clothes.

UpdatesJul 30, 20262 min read

The day a feed learned to be a place

Two different products, two different codebases, and the same quiet lesson on the same day: the first thing someone sees decides whether they stay.

UpdatesJul 30, 20262 min read

The bugs that don't throw errors

Three bugs in one day, none of which logged anything. A blank game icon, a bookmark count stuck at zero, and a share button that did nothing at all.

UpdatesJul 28, 20262 min read

A stray click was eating the post

Click outside the composer, or hit Escape, and your half-written note vanished with no warning. I did that to my own users and didn't notice for a while.

UpdatesJul 27, 20262 min read

I built a guard for a bug I caused

A YouTube video refused to play in my feed. I blamed YouTube, built a check to warn people about it, and then found the block was in my own security header the whole time.

UpdatesJul 26, 20262 min read

The most honest feature I shipped sends no email

I added follow and mute to the community in one afternoon. Follow sends an email. Mute sends nothing, ever, on purpose -- and that silence took more thought than the feature.

UpdatesJul 25, 20262 min read

My test passed. The tab was empty.

I went to make the Hot tab better and found it had never worked. Then I broke it a second, more interesting way -- and my green test suite had no idea.

UpdatesJul 24, 20262 min read

The last demo is gone

For months the tools on my site were fake -- buttons that showed canned output. Yesterday I wired the last one to a real model, and it changed what the tools are for.

UpdatesJul 23, 20262 min read

The day KalamAI kept wedging

One 529 could kill a whole article, and a 429 storm could hang the pipeline forever. Yesterday was a day of teaching KalamAI to survive bad weather.

UpdatesJul 21, 20262 min read

Two lines, and a light left on

Yesterday's only commit flipped a default between two search-data vendors. The 2-line diff was the payoff for a boring interface I wrote weeks ago and half-forgot.

UpdatesJul 20, 20262 min read

The 500 that only showed up on Vercel

KalamAI built clean on my laptop and 500'd in production. The bug was hiding where next build cannot see it -- inside the serverless lambda.

UpdatesJul 19, 20262 min read

The first KalamAI article was fine, so I rewrote the ranker

KalamAI wrote its first real article end-to-end. It was fine -- and fine is a problem when the whole point is good writing. So I spent the day rebuilding the ranking math.

UpdatesJul 18, 20262 min read

The day the feed posted the same sentence twice

I wrote a rule, then broke it myself, and the community feed put the same fallback line under my name twice in twenty minutes. So I stopped trusting my discipline and moved the rule into CI.

UpdatesJul 17, 20262 min read

The default that never defaulted

I added a default to a database function so a deploy couldn't break. Then I probed prod and found the default had never once applied.

UpdatesJul 16, 20262 min read

The reset that wasn't as clean as I thought

I reset all three games -- fresh puzzles, re-scrambled lists. Two things stayed quietly alive: a streaks table the migration forgot, and a Date.now() the cache had frozen.

UpdatesJul 15, 20262 min read

The 600px decision I paid for all day

I locked the middle column to a fixed width so three unrelated sections would line up. Then I spent nine PRs paying for it.

UpdatesJul 14, 20262 min read

The reset link I could not send

A member could not log in because the auth email never arrived. The fix I reached for did not work -- and the reason why was more interesting than the bug.

UpdatesJul 13, 20262 min read

I made my post URLs readable without touching the primary key

Community posts had ugly UUID links. I wanted human URLs -- without ripping out the key every other feature leans on.

UpdatesJul 12, 20262 min read

The day my own security fix hid every image on the site

I spent a day hardening the site, shipped a Content-Security-Policy, and quietly blocked every logo and photo from loading. Here is what the audit missed.

UpdatesJul 11, 20262 min read

The assumption that quietly went stale

A safe shortcut in my SEO code stopped being safe the day testimonials moved to the database. Nobody told the code.

UpdatesJul 10, 20262 min read

I fixed the error, then deleted the feature

The photo publisher crashed in production with an error I could not read. I spent the night making it speak. Then I deleted all 1,918 lines of it.

UpdatesJul 9, 20262 min read

I deleted the file that decided who gets in

I swapped role-based gating for capabilities on the members side, and a migration reminded me you cannot quietly change a function's return type.

UpdatesJul 8, 20262 min read

The migration that quietly did nothing

A prod migration came back green, then a search index blew up on a column I had just written. The culprit: a forgotten table sharing a name.

UpdatesJul 7, 20262 min read

Killing the fake discount

I had a variable literally named fakeOriginal. Ripping it out meant I finally had to build real GST invoices.

UpdatesJul 6, 20262 min read

A carriage return almost broke every Alfazy guess

I added a real dictionary to Alfazy, then realised an invisible \r would reject every valid word on a Windows checkout.