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  • A hook that did a query, in a loop, invisible

    A property hook written by me, against a rule written by me, fourteen months later. The rule from December 2024 was pure, cheap and total, and the first…

  • An integration that returned 200 and did nothing

    A supplier endpoint answering successfully with an empty body, for eleven weeks, after the supplier was acquired. A successful response with no content is indistinguishable from a successful…

  • A shared lint config, and the rule that was on in three of four repositories

    Four repositories with four nearly identical lint configs, and eleven rules where they disagreed. Printing the resolved configuration rather than diffing the source files is the technique —…

  • Write latency, before and after eleven indexes

    Eleven reporting indexes dropped from production tables, measured on the write path. The median saving is trivial and the tail is not, which is the usual shape of…

  • An Interactivity API block, two years on

    A carousel converted from a bespoke script in 2024, revisited to see whether the conversion held. The runtime being loaded by somebody else’s plugin means the shared cost…

  • A copy tool rejected because of a trigger

    An online schema change tool that works by adding triggers, on a table an outbox relay polls. The tool is well understood and the interaction with an existing…

  • An image rebuilt weekly, and the week it was not

    A scheduled base image rebuild, disabled during an incident in November, restored in February. A guard and the thing it guards being disabled together is the ordinary shape…

  • An ssh certificate authority, and the key’s own backup

    A certificate authority that removes eleven authorized_keys files and creates one key that must not be lost. Concentrating eleven files into one key is the point of a…

  • Composer’s audit as the only gate that has ever failed

    Four merge gates on the pipeline, and after a year one of them has ever blocked anything. A gate that fails on your own change is feedback and…

  • Container queries on a component with two placements

    A card written in 2023 with two layout branches, of which one had never rendered until January. A branch that has never executed has never been verified, and…