You're Absolutely Right?
What broke, how I fixed it and what I'd reuse, written up straight from my Claude Code transcripts while shipping real products.
- How-to7 min
Mirror Your Site as Markdown
How varstatt.com serves every page as machine-readable markdown — prebuilt at deploy, discoverable via headers, and ready for agents.
- Fix10 min
Errors That Never Left the Device
Eleven silent failure paths in a clinical iOS app. None surfaced as a backend alert, so every one of them looked like a successful upload.
- Fix3 min
Works Locally, Fails After Deployment
File tracing misses runtime paths, Cloud Run changes the working directory, CloudFront eats routes, and OG images silently vanish — four failures that pass every local test.
- Fix3 min
When the LLM Remembers Too Much
A vendor rate becomes a budget constraint and reasoning leaks across step boundaries — two failures from implicit state crossing where it shouldn't, and the architecture that fixed both.
- Fix3 min
Null Bytes, Dead Streams, Last Chunk
SSE adds overhead for mixed events, silent streams hang without error, and the last audio chunk vanishes on page close — three LLM streaming fixes.
- Fix5 min
200 OK, Data Wrong
Imagen rewrites your prompt, Lambda corrupts your binary buffer, GSC returns empty rows, and structured output truncates without error.
- Lesson5 min
Filling Forms No Tool Can Template
Every tender form is different, templating tools need placeholders you can't insert, and markdown round-trips destroy the document.
- Pattern6 min
SVG Animation Is Not DOM Animation
Rebuilding an old chart race challenge in React taught me five things SVG handles differently than the DOM. Coordinates, transforms, text, and more.
- How-to7 min
npm Trusted Publishing from GitHub Actions
Run npm publish from GitHub Actions over OIDC, with no npm token to store. Miss one requirement and npm returns a misleading 404.
- Lesson4 min
It Works, but You Can't Ship It
Two AI providers fill the form correctly. Both route document data through global endpoints that don't meet every customer's residency policy.
- Fix4 min
Three Ways the Wrong Value Won
A race condition, a stale default, and a spread operator each delivered the wrong value to production. None threw an error.
- Fix5 min
An Empty AI Response Corrupted Chat History
Gemini returned HTTP 200 with zero content. I saved the empty response to conversation history. The chat never recovered. Here's what went wrong.
- Fix5 min
Three Bugs That Were Actually My Prompts
Three debugging sessions where I chased AI misbehavior for hours. Each time the model was executing my instructions exactly as written.
- Pattern6 min
Nobody Finishes a 15-Minute AI Interview
How I decomposed a monolithic AI discovery interview into 8 standalone tools — each with its own deliverable, landing page, and search intent.
- Fix7 min
The Production Bugs That Never Threw an Error
Six bugs across OAuth, Next.js, launchd, n8n, browser APIs, and OpenAI. Every log said success. Every result was wrong.
- How-to2 min
Firestore Transactions: Race Conditions Between Cloud Functions
A runTransaction example for the case where two Cloud Function instances race to create the same external resource and one needs to win.
- How-to2 min
Merging Two Firestore Listeners for Cross-Field OR Queries
Firestore can't OR across different field types in a real-time query. Two parallel listeners merged client-side can.
- Pattern11 min
SwiftUI Is Like React + CSS-in-JS
I had to jump into an iOS codebase with no SwiftUI experience. The fastest way in was mapping everything I already knew to the Swift equivalent.
- How-to2 min
Using Shared Packages in Firebase Monorepos
Firebase breaks with file:../shared deps. Use npm pack + tarball approach: preinstall script creates .tgz locally, gets included in deploy.
- Pattern2 min
Build Apps Like LEGO Bricks
Use ports & adapters architecture to swap AI providers like LEGO bricks. Avoid vendor lock-in, optimize costs, test new models easily.
- Lesson2 min
When "Polish over Security" Costs Real Money
Client wanted to "polish features first, security later." Found exposed OpenAI API key in frontend code. Anyone could steal it and rack up unlimited charges.
- Lesson5 min
Fidder Overengineering Made Me Pay
Reduced Fidder's maintenance costs $17/month → $1/month by fixing architectural mistakes, like expensive Firestore secutiry rules and unnecessary VPS-polling.
- Pattern3 min
Releases Went From 16 Steps to One Command
Automating releases transforms them from error-prone, anxiety-inducing events into confident, one-click routines that teams like to perform