Replacing a binary threshold cliff with a one-hour ramp
The inactivity-monitor cron on a side-project safety app was paging me at 7:01 AM, every morning, with
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PHP loose comparison turned an empty endpoint into a 500
A backend I run was returning 500s on GET /api.php with no endpoint= query param. Should obviously be a 400. Tracking it down landed me on one of those…
Read →Updating a DynamoDB row by the wrong key shape, for a year
A pre-release endpoint sweep on a backend I run turned up two 500s on the check-in respond and snooze endpoints. The cause was old: a composite-key table…
Read →Auditing 22 references to GSIs that don't exist
A pre-release audit pass on a backend I run turned up 22 places where the code passed IndexName: foo-index to a DynamoDB query on a table where foo-index…
Read →Sixty-five lines ahead of git, in production
I went to deploy a fix to a backend Lambda and stopped halfway through because the file I was about to overwrite was 65 lines ahead of the repo…
Read →Heartbeats were polluting my activity table
The phone in a side-project safety app posts a stationary_heartbeat every few minutes when it's not moving — so the server knows the device is alive even…
Read →Voice on watchOS without the Speech framework
I wanted to talk to my homelab assistant from the Apple Watch. Action Button down, dictate, get a spoken reply back. Standard project except for one…
Read →The arr stack wasn't crashing, qBittorrent was thrashing
I caught a
Read →Push notifications only firing on the final assistant message
My homelab assistant runs as a Claude Code agent in the background. When it finishes a long task, it pushes a notification to my phone with the result…
Read →Mining 18,000 emails for facts about my own life
I had three years of email sitting in a DynamoDB table and a memory store wired into my assistant. The assistant was making decisions with no recall of…
Read →Personal mail as a serverless pipeline (and a forwarder identity trap)
I wanted every email to my personal domains stored in DynamoDB as the primary read surface, with Google Workspace continuing to receive a copy as a cold…
Read →Multi-select with context-aware bulk actions
I built multi-select for the mail reader UI and then almost shipped a bad version of the bulk-archive button. The fix was making the button's behavior…
Read →MIME bodies disguised as attachments
My mail reader was showing
Read →Empty bubbles on iOS when the assistant only called tools
The iOS client kept showing blank assistant bubbles in the middle of a multi-step turn. Pull-to-refresh fixed it. Notifications fired fine. The text was…
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