The ongoing conversation
A review queue can fit neatly on a phone and still leave the reviewer guessing which item to open. Hiding a column solves the space problem; whether it solves the user’s problem depends on what was in the column. In the Grand Comics Database‘s Changes Under Review queue, the State column disappeared on narrow screens, […]
A website rewrite can give its users a familiar screen and leave its next maintainer with an unfamiliar application. Someone still has to find the rule behind a wrong number, work out why a save failed, and make the next change without breaking the last one. That person belongs in the framework discussion. In the […]
Getting a sorceress into a board game involved learning Lua, baking textures in Blender, and explaining to an AI assistant that “Add one kill per Hero Stone” was an important distinction. I adapted Goblin Slayer, a board game by Rich Carlson and Iikka Keränen, for Tabletop Simulator. It gave me a concrete reason to learn […]
A PDF preview loaded on a WordPress site I was working on, but the original PDF returned “access denied”. I had already worked on an upload-permission repair, and the tests had passed. The next uploads showed what my earlier tests had missed. The first repair addressed permissions in the upload folders. Existing files became readable, […]
While prepping an orienteering trail, we needed to compare GPS track and photographs alongside an existing map that might be out of date with the current park trails. That was the delivery problem for the Grant Park review tool: put the material together so it could be examined, layers compared, and photos of interesting features […]
A search in a job search application I’m developing reported success without finding any usable postings. The workers were running, the task had finished, and the application reported no error. Unfortunately, the user wants job postings, not reassurance about the workers. Finding nothing can be a perfectly valid result; the problem was that the application […]
On one of my pull requests for the Grand Comics Database project, Gemini Code Assist offered three suggestions: two warned about possible errors and the third suggested a clearer way to write a loop. I accepted the third and explained why I wasn’t making the other two changes. The warnings sounded reasonable, but they depended […]