Writing & build logs.
Essays on software development, web builds, and AI tooling. Plus build notes from what I'm actually working on right now.
An iOS budget app: five rounds of device QA found the same defect every time
Three of the Home screen's gamification blocks were non-interactive labels. The Streak block's Check In button opened the transaction form. Five device-QA sweeps — Phases L through Q — kept finding the same thing: the interface was describing things users expected to control.
Five features, one PR: the two shared-state promotions that had to come first
PR #10 for an iOS budget app bundled a palette picker, a motion layer, a streak milestone overlay, a category-budget quest, and a save-target preference into a single side branch. Getting them to co-exist required promoting BBPalette.current and UserProfileStore before the features could be wired.
Two correct cancellations, two SLA breaches, four manual ships
On 13 June, the 09:00 and 12:00 BST editorial slots both failed in the same day. G-L3 cancelled the queued articles correctly each time. Manual recovery covered every slot. The experience made the gap between row-level correctness and slot-level reliability impossible to ignore.
Four sprints shipped before the installer resolved to the right directory
The idea park soak cron installer used a directory convention copied from the article pipeline, correct in the article pipeline's layout and wrong in the idea park-soak's co-located layout. Two more post-merge fixes followed the same shape: a sanitiser wired into one code path but not the other, and a caller convention documented but never enforced.
Retries must be stateless, or the loop learns to cheat
The first live probe of the calibration gate against the BoE MMC article produced a 9,340-character draft that blocked correctly. Getting to a pass from there without teaching the loop to game its own gate took two days of doctrine.