NOTES
Engineering notes from building production systems.
What I built, the commands I ran, the numbers I measured and what I would change. Written for engineers.
NOTES BY EMAIL
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Resumable Line Provisioning: Save the Assistant ID Before the SIP Call
A line create command for AI phone receptionists that resumes each step from what the client file already proves, with one critical ordering fix: persist the assistant ID before the SIP create.
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PixiJS Sets touch-action: none, and Phones Stopped Scrolling Over the Photos
PixiJS defaults to touch-action: none on its canvas, which silently kills page scroll on phones. Three CSS properties and a Playwright audit fix it for good.
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PostgREST Stops at 1,000 Rows and the Dashboard Never Says So
PostgREST silently caps unpaged selects at 1,000 rows. An admin dashboard counting synced jobs in memory showed 0 for newer users once the table grew past that limit.
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Pulling n8n Executions into Postgres: Oldest First, Replay-Safe, Blind to Hand Edits
An edge function on a five-minute cron pulls n8n workflow executions into Postgres oldest-first, with replay safety proven across two backfills and 209 executions writing zero duplicate events.
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A Fake SMS YES Could Have Won a Lead and Charged a Card
An open webhook on a plumber lead network accepted any POST, meaning a spoofed YES could claim a lead and trigger a card charge. Basic auth fixed it with a zero-downtime rollout.
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A Broadcast Tool for 860 Members Now Needs a Typed SEND
One misclick in a members composer could mail 860 people instantly. Two commits fixed that: a typed confirm step and a split send-test endpoint.
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Months of Green Ticks over a Cleanup Job That Never Deleted a File
A scheduled cleanup reported success for months while doing nothing. pm2 never read the droplet .env, so CLEANUP_SECRET was undefined, every call got a 403, and an echo fallback swallowed the error.
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Stripe Redelivered a Stale payment_failed After the Customer Had Already Paid
A checkout decline raised invoice.payment_failed before the subscription row existed, the handler threw, and Stripe redelivered the event after the customer paid, flipping them to past_due.
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Choosing a Voice Agent's Transcriber by Measured Turn Latency
Three transcribers failed or lagged before landing on Soniox primary with Deepgram fallback. The 1.8 s average from one provider caused the agent to cut callers off nine times.
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Tell a Model to Aim at the Floor and Half Its Drafts Fall Under It
When the length target and the throw floor are the same number, the model clusters at it. Separating aim, expansion threshold, throw floor and ceiling fixed the distribution.
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Haiku Invented the Date on 10 of 18 Nightly Notes, So the Script Owns It Now
A nightly capture job let Haiku write the H1 date and it hallucinated it on 10 of 18 notes.
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The Idle Watchdog That Killed Healthy Reasoning Models at 300 Seconds
A file-size watchdog could not tell a thinking model from a wedged process. A throttled heartbeat sidecar fixed it without letting genuine wedges survive.
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My Agent Loop Marked 15 Tasks Done With No Tests Running
Every gate stage defaulted to an empty string, so 15 tasks logged gate:none and the harness called the run clean. A severity-ladder preflight now blocks a hollow gate stack before task selection.
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Two Mobile Scroll-Video Bugs That Only Show Up on Real Phones
iOS holds a paused video at readyState 1 so every seek stays pending and the frame paints black. A second bug: ScrollTrigger points computed once go stale when page content grows.
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Six Local Supabase Stacks, 61 Containers, and 96% Swap
Running six local Supabase stacks simultaneously pushed swap to 96% and caused repeated OOM failures during db reset. The real lesson is surfacing infrastructure exhaustion before blaming your code.
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The Silent Redirect That Made Uploads Vanish
A submitted upload looked lost because a route redirect swallowed it into a magazine edition. Here is how the redirect was found and removed.
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Notes Is Prerendered Markdown, Not a CMS
How the dil.dev/notes pipeline works: markdown files, a Vite plugin, strict frontmatter validation, and no CMS in sight.
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The Skull Turns Once Across Eight Stops, Newest First
The home page is now the skull lab: a Tripo sugar-skull bust rotates one full revolution across eight project stops, driven entirely by scroll position.
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Reduced Motion Skips the Skull Engine and the Split Titles
Reduced-motion visitors skip engine loading and SplitText entirely. The smoke transition falls back to plain navigation so nothing breaks.
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Every Canonical on https://dil.dev, Including the Sitemap
Every URL on dil.dev points its canonical, og:url and sitemap loc at the apex host. A postbuild script enforces this so a stray Netlify subdomain never leaks into the index.
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A Thank-You Page Visit Is Not a Lead
Counting a thank-you page visit as a conversion inflates your lead numbers. Fire tracking only after Netlify acknowledges a real submission.
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Consent Under the Mark, Once, Never a Banner
The preloader asks for analytics consent once, under the mark. No banner, no fixed control. Here is how the pattern works and why it holds.
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Three Labels on a Tilted Ring Around the Skull, Dimming Behind It
Year, stop count and VIEW orbit the skull on a tilted ring that dims labels as they pass behind it. This is the only place translate and parallax are permitted.
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A Hidden Instrument: Self-Hosted MediaPipe Hands, Camera Never Shown
dil.dev has a browser instrument hidden behind three entry points. Start loads ~20 MB of self-hosted MediaPipe and Tone.js; the camera feed is never rendered or sent anywhere.
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58MB to 1.6MB: shipping a 3D face mesh with glTF-Transform and scroll-driven three.js
An AI-generated head mesh came out at 57.97MB and 987,094 vertices. One glTF-Transform command took it to 1.61MB and 89,200 vertices for a scroll-driven three.js hero.
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Smoke page transitions: domain-warped fbm from the click point, checked in real Chrome
A raw WebGL 1 shader blooms smoke from the click, swaps the page behind it without a reload, then drains toward the pointer. Plus the Playwright timing bug that made my checks sample 1.4s late.
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Netlify config.path vs a netlify.toml redirect: why /api/* 404'd
A forced /api/* rewrite pointed at /.netlify/functions/api, a URL that stops existing once a v2 function sets config.path. Every data route 404'd in production. The fix was deleting one redirect rule.
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