Entries Filed
027
Cadence
Weekly
Active Since
April 2026
Words Written
~ 28k
27 entries · sorted newest first
2026 27 entries · year to date
Weekly Update — w/c 5th October 2026

Twenty-six items to Done and none to Won't Do, against twenty-three the week before, twelve of them N17 Time's and its sibling's. Ten external monitors went up across six sites on Wednesday, three of them watching a new endpoint that answers only when a client site's server-side code is actually running, and one of N17 Time's alerting when a phrase appears rather than when one goes missing. The sibling gained cup ties, a league table, directions and a domain of its own, and the same three features reached N17 Time the next day, each answered differently because its data is different. The retained veterinary practice's first week on its new site closed with nothing raised, and an independent garage's mail policy held at reject through a clean fortnight. In progress across the board stands at nine.

Cloud & DevOps~ 7 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 28th September 2026

Twenty-three items to Done and none to Won't Do, against thirty-one the week before, eight of them the retained veterinary practice's and eight a new project's. The practice's new site went live on Saturday afternoon, once every record in the old zone had been accounted for and the new one proved to match it record by record, with nothing at the old host touched so that undoing the switch stayed a single change. N17 Time has a sibling, built from its code for a second club, which merges the club's own calendar with a free source that knows the whole league; when that source refused requests from an address shared with strangers, the refresh stopped expecting to succeed first time. A local dog-training club's social media images are now drawn by a script, so the next change of wording is a re-run. In progress across the board stands at nine.

Cloud & DevOps~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 21st September 2026

Thirty-one items to Done and none to Won't Do, against twenty-five the week before, sixteen of them CronCal's and ten the retained veterinary practice's. The question last week's entry left open was answered that same evening: Quartz 3 and Quartz 4 became two dialects, and a link shared under the old name keeps its meaning. CronCal's parsers are now checked against the reference implementations' own tests and a cloud provider's documentation, pinned so that no version bump lands unrefreshed; mutation testing runs at last, its verdicts tested by hand before they were believed; and its acceptance checklist was signed off against production. Two domains went to a reject policy for mail, for opposite reasons. The veterinary practice's forms were proven by the headers of real submissions, and its site build closed with images and video re-encoded on a machine with no encoder installed. In progress across the board stands at eight.

Engineering~ 7 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 14th September 2026

Twenty-five items to Done and none to Won't Do, against fifteen the week before, eighteen of them CronCal's. Its specification asked for a mobile performance score the arithmetic cannot reach — about four megabytes over a throttled connection is twenty-one seconds, and the download is the metric — so the target became a floor and a transfer budget, and half a megabyte came off first load from a single line. Every cron rule now evaluates in its own zone, resolving the missing hour and the repeated hour the way each real scheduler does, on a bridge that round-trips all 597 time zones exactly from 2020 onwards. A test-framework major that was not a version bump, a scheduler major investigated and declined because it changes what an expression means, and four client sites that now say who built them. N17 Time now shows the score while a match is on, verified end to end on a real one. In progress across the board stands at eight.

Engineering~ 7 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 7th September 2026

Fifteen items to Done and none to Won't Do, against seventy-eight the week before. The retained veterinary practice's new site moved into accounts the practice owns — a code-hosting account and a hosting account in its own name, a mirror of the whole history into its own repository that writes down whether it ran, and a deploy credential scoped so that it lapses of its own accord when our membership of the account ends. The platform's own repository integration was declined because it installs a relationship rather than a key, and a relationship has to be remembered to be removed. A local dog-training club's enrolment form gained a required class selector routed per class, and its photography line stopped being a notice and became a question nobody can leave unanswered. N17 Time gained a full season page for no new storage and no new scheduled work, became installable with the last known fixture readable offline, and took cookieless analytics — which cost it the no-third-party-requests claim this journal made eight days ago. In progress across the board stands at nine.

Stewardship~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 31st August 2026

Seventy-eight items to Done and none to Won't Do. Three sites went live in two days — an independent garage's, closing an engagement whose agreement was signed the same week; CronCal on croncal.dev, making public a tool that has been quietly internal for most of a year; and N17 Time on n17time.app, a Tottenham fixture page built and shipped in a day, with no cookies, no third-party requests and a page that works with scripting disabled. Last year's careful architecture for that one — onion layers, repository wrappers, separate folders — was retired in favour of two source files, and the simpler design is the one that shipped. A junior chess club's required CI job came down from seven minutes thirty-nine to one minute one with nothing removed, and its link checking moved onto a sitemap generated from the tree being deployed, which is the only form of that check able to see a page being added. A carefully reasoned prediction about a second origin measured three hundred milliseconds the wrong way. In progress across the board stands at eight.

Engineering~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 24th August 2026

Sixty-eight items to Done and one to Won't Do, nineteen of them closing after the last entry was filed — the earliest filing in this record, and the longest tail it has left. Two client sites reached their own domains four days apart: a junior chess club's on the Sunday, and a clinical canine massage practice's on the Thursday, the latter behind three converging gates including a regulator registration number that had stood as a placeholder in the footer until it arrived. A tag holding the chess club's site out of search results was found to be owned by no open ticket at all, surfaced by a performance gate whose printed exclusion named a ticket closed thirteen days earlier. A policy check that stalled for three minutes and named nothing was given a bounded wait that fails loudly, then fired for real the same day and named seven figures on one page. The retained veterinary practice gained most of a site in a day, and an independent garage's one-pager replaced a hosted platform. In progress across the board held at nine.

Engineering~ 7 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 17th August 2026

Fifty-three items to Done and four to Won't Do, eight of them closing in the hours after the last entry was filed. A junior chess club's accessibility work was audited by hand for the first time — four manual sweeps, a focus ring measured at 1.9:1 that every automated gate had passed for weeks, and the statement published behind them. A dated evidence pack was found to have overwritten the finding it existed to preserve, and the generators now refuse rather than replace. A performance audit scoring zero turned out to cost 753 milliseconds if satisfied, so nothing changed except the note left where somebody would act. The club's first real news post went out, and the weekly runbook was executed end to end for the first time. A local dog-training club's new site was built out across a single evening, with the club owning its own hosting, repository and mirror. In progress across the board rose from five items to nine.

Engineering~ 7 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 10th August 2026

Seventy-five items to Done and six to Won't Do, thirteen of them belonging to a week already written up and closed in the hours after the last entry was filed. The junior chess club's governance block — open since the middle of July and listed as outstanding only last week — closed entirely, along with the privacy notice, the cookie policy, and a dated evidence pack behind its central claim. The retained veterinary practice's two domains gained signed outbound mail, a tightened sending policy and reporting in monitoring mode — the full set, verified end to end. Teaching material was found to be text baked into images, which no automated check can see. The accessibility gate was counting more rules than it evaluated, and the performance budget moved onto the recognised standard rather than down to meet the site. A beauty therapy studio's site went live and was verified on the production domain; a building and landscaping firm's old hosting was cancelled after its soak ran clean. In progress across the whole board fell from eighteen items to five.

Stewardship~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 3rd August 2026

Fifty-seven items to Done and four to Won't Do, seven of them belonging to a week already written up and closed in the hours after the last entry was filed — the second week running that the tail after filing has not been empty. A client's domain moved hosts in under an hour on the Sunday afternoon, backup first and verification last. For the junior chess club the week's build was a game viewer: comments and variations, a static-position mode for the teaching pages, keyboard operability, lazy initialisation, and a no-JavaScript fallback that exists as authored because the site has no build step to generate one. A rule cited by seven tickets and reciprocated by none of them was made visible from its own ticket, by a sweep that had been built twice and lost twice before anyone committed it. Two more quality gates were caught reporting the wrong thing rather than nothing at all. A new engagement for a beauty therapy studio went from nothing to a nearly-finished site across two evenings. The trace identifier, the internal developer tool and the family-history foundations stood exactly where they were left.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 27th July 2026

Fifty-four items to Done — the largest week in this record — and five of them belong to a week already written up, closed in the half-hour after the last entry had been filed. For the junior chess club it was the build week proper: design tokens, a base layout and nine page templates in four days, with the palette's contrast measured against the AA thresholds before a single template was built on it. Then the gates built the week before were themselves audited, and four of the findings were about the checks rather than the site — a version pin that printed but never asserted, an accessibility gate that could not fail on six rules, a required check that gated the deploy but not the merge, and a viewport width nothing measured at all while the automated pass reported green. A second engagement went from signed-off specification to deployable site in a single evening. The retained veterinary practice turned a registration form into a waiting list, the e-commerce items raised a week earlier all closed, and the trace identifier, the internal developer tool and the family-history foundations stood exactly where they were left.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 20th July 2026

Paperwork first, then platform, then content — twenty-one items to Done, four of them landing on the Sunday evening after last week's entry had already been filed. The junior chess club engagement this journal could not describe a week ago now has both instruments executed: a services agreement and an Article 28 data-processing agreement, signed and returned before a line was built. Then the foundations went in — a private repository whose private status was verified rather than assumed, a static web app in an EU region confirmed in the portal rather than merely intended, and a nine-check consistency gate that notices the things a person eventually won't, including the location data photographs carry out of the camera. Two spikes settled a rendering question on real handsets and a licensing question before it could reach the deliverable. The retained veterinary practice's entries were cleared down again, three new e-commerce items opened on Sunday, and the trace identifier, the internal developer tool and the family-history foundations stood exactly where they were left.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 13th July 2026

The record, and the work that comes before the work. Seven items to Done and eight closed as Won't Do — a week that decided against rather more than it completed. The practice's own working notes for this site — its conventions, its amendment process, its redaction rules — were moved out of a machine-local store and into the repository, where they can be diffed and argued with like anything else; the check that prompted the move found them six versions out of date. A new unpaid engagement opened midweek and deliberately built nothing, its agreement not yet executed. The long-standing discount-code investigation was closed on the e-commerce side, the retained veterinary practice's form entries were cleared down again, and the internal developer tool, the trace identifier and the family-history foundations all stood exactly where they were left.

Maintenance~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 6th July 2026

The books, and the quiet work of subtraction. Fourteen items to Done across four projects, and not a new feature among them. The practice turned first to its own house — the year-end accounts and the VAT position analysed, the bookkeeping put on an automated footing; then outward, where an enterprise e-commerce order integration lost a layer of logic it had outgrown and gained an honest map of how a partner brand's orders and payments actually reach the finance system. The retained veterinary practice's site had an embedded third-party form taken out and a real booking route put in its place, and a September fee change published well ahead of the day it takes effect. A local dog-training club's handover was settled, and the internal developer tool stood exactly where last week left it.

Stewardship~ 7 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 29th June 2026

Proof, and the apparatus of publication. The internal developer tool took thirty of the week's thirty-six closed items — not new faculties this time but the two things that turn a working instrument into a releasable one: a full automated test suite that proves it behaves — unit, property-based, snapshot and component tests, with benchmarks and coverage — which paid for itself at once by surfacing two genuine faults; and the public scaffolding a tool needs before strangers can use it — reference documentation for each cron dialect it speaks, a cookbook of worked examples, and the privacy, security-disclosure and credits apparatus that lets it stand in the open. Alongside it, a family-history application's cloud foundations stayed in flight, and the smaller retained work was quietly kept.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 22nd June 2026

The inward tool, given its working faculties. The internal developer tool took twenty-one of the week's thirty-four closed items, carried from a face to an instrument that does its three jobs: a schedule you can type and read back in plain language, a calendar that shows the days it will actually fire — month, week and agenda, exportable to a real diary or spreadsheet — and a compare mode that sets two schedules side by side and marks the difference. Alongside it, a clinical canine massage practice's site gained its audit, telemetry and bot-protection layer ahead of launch, and the smaller retained work was quietly kept.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 15th June 2026

The inward week, continued — and the inward thing given a face. The new internal developer tool took thirteen of the week's eighteen closed items, carried from a working core to the surface a person actually touches: a visual design system and layout shell, working state held in a shareable link, and an end-to-end test harness wired into CI. Alongside it, a clinical canine massage practice's contact pipeline was proven and switched live, and the smaller retained work was quietly kept.

Engineering~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 8th June 2026

A week turned inward. A new internal developer tool — a cron-expression calculator, describer and comparer — took the bulk of it: thirty-two items, from an empty repository and CI pipeline through a complete domain layer and three cron parsers to a working set of services, while the enterprise e-commerce support carried on and the retained clients were quietly kept.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 1st June 2026

The mirror image of last week. The new clinical canine massage practice took the bulk of it — thirty-seven items, from signed paperwork through a scaffolded repository and provisioned cloud to a working, tested contact pipeline — while the internal platform's modelling advanced and the retained clients were quietly kept.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 25th May 2026

A building week, and mostly out of sight. The internal quantitative sports-analytics platform took the bulk of it — twenty-six items, from data ingestion through modelling to a working execution service — while a new client engagement's foundations were laid and the retained clients quietly tended.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 18th May 2026

Closing week. The company-website infrastructure programme reached its formal end — DNS authority returned to GoDaddy, legacy hosting cancelled, observation closed — while a new local-client engagement began the right way, with foundations before code.

Stewardship~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 11th May 2026

The week after. Phase 7 closed as an epic, telemetry sharpened, uptime watched from the outside, mirrors and archives put in place — and an enterprise e-commerce go-live entered its post-cutover hyper-care phase.

Stewardship~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 4th May 2026

Launch week. Two production go-lives in seven days — the new company website went live at thecodeabides.co.uk, and an enterprise e-commerce platform reached its own cutover milestone alongside.

Cloud & DevOps~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 27th April 2026

Two long-running engineering arcs converging in the same seven days — a new company website on Azure built feature-complete, and an enterprise e-commerce client cutover commenced. Forty-nine items to Done across three projects.

Engineering~ 6 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 20th April 2026

A quieter week, by design. The headline activity was unglamorous and important — a comprehensive npm package upgrade sweep across five Node.js microservices, kept on cadence as a matter of supply-chain hygiene.

Maintenance~ 4 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 13th April 2026

Five active projects, including the kick-off of a new internal initiative — a quantitative sports analytics platform moved from idea to scaffolded codebase, with progress alongside on greenfield development, enterprise e-commerce, and client IT.

Engineering~ 5 mins
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Weekly Update — w/c 7th April 2026

A founding week. The full application scaffold for a bespoke web platform came together on a .NET 10 / C# 14 stack with Onion Architecture across five projects, and the CI pipeline that will carry the work was wired up alongside.

Engineering~ 4 mins
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End of record · The journal begins here