Posts

The date that was yesterday until 3am

A one-line date bug that only existed between midnight and 03:00, in an app whose heaviest users work nights. Then my fix for it turned out to be wrong in two of the three places I applied it.

Friday, September 11, 2026 | 3 min read Read

Enforcing a Content-Security-Policy without nonces

My app's pages each carried thousands of lines of inline JavaScript, which is exactly what a strict Content-Security-Policy forbids. Getting to an enforcing policy took one line of JSON per page and no nonce machinery at all.

Thursday, September 10, 2026 | 3 min read Read

The badge that said 21 for a count of 1

I added a small shield badge showing how many months someone had won a challenge. On my own profile, with one win, it said 21. The sample render I had checked it against said 1.

Monday, September 7, 2026 | 2 min read Read

The stale Excel export was Cloudflare, not Excel

I re-downloaded a spreadsheet export and got the version from before my last edit. Another machine got the current one. Nothing in my app was wrong, and nothing in Excel either.

Thursday, September 3, 2026 | 3 min read Read

Safari could not download the file

A download button in an app I maintain failed on a Mac with WebKitBlobResource error 1. The fix was to delete code: the server had been able to do the job by itself all along.

Wednesday, September 2, 2026 | 2 min read Read

The scanner that was never broken

The scan half of my HP OfficeJet had never worked from this machine, and I'd filed that under driver problems. No driver was needed. There was no scanner software installed at all, and the real mistakes started after I installed some.

Sunday, August 30, 2026 | 5 min read Read

The 144 Hz monitor that preferred 60

My 144 Hz panel ran at 60 from the day the machine was built, and again after a graphics card swap. Different cause each time, and nothing reported a problem.

Friday, August 28, 2026 | 7 min read Read

Where the distro hopping stopped

Ubuntu, Zorin, CachyOS, and now Omarchy. Why the hopping stopped: keyboard-first everything, apps that earn their keep, and a distro built to be made yours.

Monday, August 24, 2026 | 4 min read Read

I wrote the lesson down. I broke it two days later.

My project keeps a lessons-learned file. Going back through my notes, I found the same pattern five times: the lesson gets written down, and the repeat comes anyway.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 | 5 min read Read

My GitHub recovery codes lived on GitHub

I found my GitHub recovery codes in my notes vault - the vault that syncs to GitHub. Six months in git history, two copies. What I did about it, and the question I should have asked first.

Sunday, August 2, 2026 | 3 min read Read

OneDrive and git fought over my vault. Both lost.

My notes vault appeared to delete itself, git recorded 146 deletions that never happened, and OneDrive forked 120 conflict copies. Nothing was lost, and the warning was in the manual all along.

Friday, July 31, 2026 | 7 min read Read

Case study: the Paul Newman Cup

A full walk-through of a small production Flask app: the operational problem, the architecture, the identity-versus-permission model, the database and deployment decisions, the failure scenarios, and what shipping it taught me.

Friday, July 24, 2026 | 11 min read Read