When the Official API Lies
A week of pulling museum accession numbers and biblical texts taught me that a 403 is honest and a 200 can be a lie. The fix was to stop being a client and open a browser.
Builder Journal
Every Business Formation Spike in Colorado Springs Traces to One Suite Number
A single commercial registered-agent suite on Kelly Johnson Blvd is the principal address on 4,495 El Paso County entities. Strip it out and the monthly formation series goes completely flat. No wrongdoing, just a measurement problem hiding in a public statistic.
Regional Economics
Everything Fragile Was Inside One Request
I wrote a non-negotiable rule about never making a web request wait on AI, then broke it in my own health feature. Three bugs later I saw they were all the same bug.
Builder Journal
Every Fasting Reading Showed Up at Lunch
I pulled 800 readings off a blood glucose meter with a browser tab. The meter was right about all of them. My parser was six hours wrong about every single one.
Builder Journal
The Dataset in My Notes Wasn't the One on Disk
Five separate bugs in one week of training-data work, and every one of them was the same bug: I had been auditing the description of the data instead of the data.
Builder Journal
The Fixes That Lived on One Machine
My deploy box is not allowed to commit code. Last week I found out it had been quietly fixing itself anyway, and those fixes existed in exactly one place on earth.
Builder Journal
The Notebook Was The Dataset
My wife has written down every movie we watch together since 2023.
Builder Journal
The Timeout That Measured Nothing
My UI announced a failure for a job that was fine. Three fixes later, the one that actually solved it was deleting a client-side timer that measured nothing.
Builder Journal
The Bugs That Only Appear on the Second Run
Putting a working pipeline on a schedule surfaced four bugs that were invisible on run one, including one that ate 12,563 business formation records.
Builder Journal