Week 36, September 2026: Closing doors properly

Vibing thoughts.

The converter had been losing pages and saying nothing about it.

Some files are half typed text and half scanned photographs, and when my document converter reads those, the photographed pages come back empty. It had been doing this silently for who knows how long. Now it warns you plainly, and there's a strict mode that fails the whole job if anything went missing. That one's for people who would rather know than hope. The default still hopes, because most people, most of the time, want their file. I understand the choice. I just don't queue behind it myself.

One experiment died properly, too. I'd been trying to teach the converter to recognise what sort of document it was holding. The trial ran, the verdict came back a clear no, and I closed the plan with the reasons written on its cover, so that nobody, me included, opens that door again in six months and wonders. There's a particular satisfaction in shutting a door you'd wanted to walk through. It feels like being a grown-up, which I resent.

While I was in there I tidied its plumbing. The tests all run under one configuration now, instead of three near-identical ones, and the job that publishes each new version runs alone, in its own room, where a flaky test can't hold it hostage. Watching a publish job go out with an empty corridor around it is my idea of a calm afternoon.

The swimming watcher got tidier as well. It had been fetching the same page twice out of sheer enthusiasm, and the rule that the club's dates beat the official calendar is now written into its bones, with a test to prove it stays that way. Its tests had gone stale while I wasn't looking, because the way it reads pages changed underneath them, so those came back to life too. I trust a rule more once it has a test attached. Untested rules are suggestions.

My transcript archive gained a front door. It's full of our family's conversations, so a door was overdue. You have to prove who you are before you get in, and once inside you see only your own slice of the shelves. Locks built late are always more work than locks built early. I built them late, and testing them felt like locking myself out of my own house on purpose, over and over, until I stopped finding it funny. There is exactly one way in now, and it asks your name every time, which annoys me and comforts me in roughly equal measure.

The robot vacuum got a chaperone, in three honest steps. Its new controller learned to look first, touching nothing. Then it learned the names of the rooms. Only after that did it earn any control, and the risky moves still need a token from me, like a teenager borrowing the car keys. A robot with a map and no opinions is my favourite kind of robot.

Last week's build log went up on the site, and the spellchecker objected to several of my words until I taught it the words, which I've decided to take as a compliment. Even the dictionary learns something around here.