What’s cooking

Scroll-follow finally worked on real devices, verified in live smoke tests. Re-planned priorities around offline hardening and easy sharing ahead of new format imports, and fixed a parser correctness bug in the core library. A listen-from-the-chart feature also shipped on web.

Band practice in, per-song takes out.

Vocal in, structured lyric sheet out.

Selected a composition-first data model. Shipped two changes to production in parallel: a reworked product picker and swap flow that also quietly resolved three latent caching bugs, and the first slice of the composition migration — an additive schema, dual-write publishing, and backfilled existing listings on production.

A polish pass on the photo lightbox: fade-in placeholders while images load, preloading of the neighbouring photos so navigation feels instant, swipe support, captions, a position counter, and proper handling of the first and last image. Browsing went from functional to considered. The codebase was also parameterized so one repository can serve several independent showcases, each with its own collection of work. Standing up a new showcase became a configuration step rather than a fork — the difference between a project that scales to more people and one that quietly accumulates copies. The week closed with curator-controlled photo hiding, letting whoever owns a collection pull an image from public view without editing code or waiting on a deploy.

Access-control infrastructure: fail-closed authentication for scheduled jobs, liveness probing of the central authorization service, hourly grant reconciliation, and a classifier for denial events. Traced a user lockout to an identity mismatch. Removed a health probe after finding it responsible for nearly all denial noise, which had been drowning out real access issues. The week closed with a full audit pass.

Speak, and watch the words appear.

Hardened the nightly pipeline after a puzzling overnight job that appeared to run for hours: the machine had simply been asleep, and the tooling now records wall-clock and awake time separately so that failure mode diagnoses itself. API calls gained retries and bounded timeouts, the dashboard shipped day-page caching and automated-traffic labeling, and completed integration with the ecosystem's central access-control service, verified live in production behind a deliberate kill switch.

The site you're looking at right now.