Development
A UX decision I got wrong on the first try
The add-to-playlist action matched its sibling gesture on the same card - and fought the rest of the app. Picking the wrong reference point for "consistent."
Dev Log
Building in public
Notes on the software, games, and music coming out of Imperfect Systems.
RSS feedDevelopment
Three ways "the spec said X" was wrong
A dead symlink target, a fix already queued by automation, and docs describing components that don't exist - three sources of truth, same lesson each time.
Development
Proving the backup actually works
"We have backups" and "we have backups that work" are different claims. A file-level restore, a query against the restored data, and a stray copy cleaned up along the way.
Development
A two-second accessibility gate that runs on every push
axe-core over the existing component-test harness, scoped to actual WCAG rules - and an honest accounting of what a jsdom gate structurally cannot catch.
Development
Three lines of config, an afternoon of verification
Uncommenting three Rails SSL flags took ten minutes. Reading the framework source and testing two plausible but wrong review findings took the rest of the day.
Development
The favicon that was broken for months and nobody would have known
A perf batch with an easy half (prerender, PNG optimization) and a silent failure: an SVG favicon whose external image reference browsers drop without a word.
Development
The Discover tab that got permanently stuck digging
A failed artist fetch never counted as checked, so one bad artist re-selected itself forever - and the fix tripped a second guard only a multi-round test could catch.
Development
Testing a deploy gate accidentally deployed the thing I was testing
Adding astro check and Prettier before every deploy, a type error the sibling site had already solved, and a manual build trigger with no concept of a dry run.
Development
A doc-drift fix that wasn't as boring as it sounded
Three audit items that each turned into something: a half-fixed claim, a quietly dead password reset, and a staging email that would have linked to production.
Development
A docs sweep that found two more stale claims than expected
Six known drift items on the list, two more found by actually running the documented commands, and a rename fix that project memory made narrower than find-replace.
Page 7 of 14