Writing & build logs.
Essays on software development, web builds, and AI tooling. Plus build notes from what I'm actually working on right now.
The E2E suite billed 1,130 minutes to test a page that never existed
A Playwright suite on a private repo ran 69 times in three weeks, failed 61 of them, and billed roughly a thousand minutes doing it. The root cause was three mistakes stacked on top of each other, and the deepest one was mine: I did not know GitHub Actions had a bill.
The backlog called it a content gap. It was navigation.
Completing an eight-chapter course on the learning hub felt like progress. Then I looked at what had actually moved the needle — track sections, prerequisite chips, and a JSON-LD breadcrumb. The backlog had been mis-filing the bottleneck for months.
The search index built in three seconds. Five phases made that possible.
Pagefind took an afternoon to wire up. The navigation phases before it took a week. A search index returns what’s there — and what needed to be there first was structure.
AdSense readiness: the checklist caught one gap, the reviewer found another, the sweep found a third
Seven out of eight on the automated readiness audit, then rejected for low value content anyway. The fix required three rounds: media diversity closed before submission, hollow hub listings after rejection, and a site-wide sweep that stripped fabricated trust signals the structural checklist had no way to catch.
Google's AdSense reviewer checklist returned 7 of 8 green. Format diversity was the one that counted.
Running Google's reviewer checklist against UK Calculators returned 7 of 8 green. The one red item was format diversity: zero of 38 articles had any embedded visual content. Eight days after submission, rejected for low value content — a checklist score doesn't carry item weights, and format diversity was the one Google's reviewer weighted most.