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  • The suite that got slower because of one fixture

    A test suite that went from four minutes to eleven over six weeks, with no test added that was individually slow. A fixture that is individually reasonable and…

  • Reusable workflows, and the inputs that became an API

    A reusable workflow shared across four repositories, and the eleventh input added because one repository was different. Every input is a branch in the workflow and eleven of…

  • A sparse fieldset that was invented by accident

    A response that omits fields when a header is present, implemented three years ago for one consumer and never documented. The behaviour was correct and the mechanism was…

  • The migration Rector wrote and we rewrote

    An automated refactor across 412 files, a diff of 8,000 lines, and three wrong hunks in it. The review nobody could actually do.

  • The temporary table that spilled to disk every time

    A query creating an internal temporary table that exceeded the in-memory limit on every execution, silently. The ratio of disk to memory temporary tables is the diagnostic and…

  • Layer rules after a merge, and the baseline that grew

    Merging two codebases produced a layer rule baseline of 188 violations, where each had been under five. A baseline that jumps is nearly always a configuration problem rather…

  • The document that was 400 KB because of one field

    A search document carrying the full product description as both an indexed text field and a stored copy, on a catalogue where descriptions run to several pages. The…

  • Eight failure modes covering forty-one incidents

    Three years of incident notes, read as an inventory rather than as history. Eight documents cover eighty-seven per cent of what has ever gone wrong, which is a…

  • json_validate on a webhook body before anything else

    A webhook endpoint accepting bodies up to eight megabytes, and the signature check running after the decode. Validating before decoding costs one pass over the string and allocates…

  • @starting-style, and an entry animation without JavaScript

    An element that starts hidden and animates in had needed a class added on the next frame, because there is no style to transition from. The requestAnimationFrame dance…