What I've been building

The plan for golden was written and refined, a single working example app that new projects copy from instead of repeating setup and drifting.

A code review checked how the planner held up after its recent features, and mapped out the fixes and tidy-up that come next.

This was groundwork rather than a visible feature, covering the text-message conversations, scheduled jobs and account checks that make up Anecdote.

The toolkit that measures how the apps behave now follows reads and writes to the cache, the fast store that avoids repeat work.

Behind-the-scenes monitoring now records more detail about how the app’s parts work together, so faults can be traced and fixed faster.

The backend behind the site gained detailed timing records, so a slow response can now be pinned to the step that caused it.

The service that routes text messages and AI calls now records how long its internal steps take, so a slow request can be traced.

Behind the sign-in flow, the service now records its own activity in more detail, naming the Google token step and grouping requests by route rather than by user id.

Storymap now records its own internal steps in more detail, so a slow or failing request can be traced to the operation behind it.

The shared tracing tools that measure the live apps gained a more detailed view of where each request’s time goes.

• Traces now group requests by their route pattern instead of the exact web address, so every hit to one screen lines up together.
• You can now see the time spent handing a request from one service to another, which was hidden before inside the receiving service.
• Database traces now show how many rows a query read, so one that scans a whole table stands out instead of looking fast.

Storymap got a nudge to where it opens and a fix that protects work you haven’t saved yet.

• Opening storymap now takes you straight to the Planner board, instead of the general workspace board it showed before.
• Saving no longer fails when you close an item then reopen it before saving, which used to leave your edits stuck and unrecoverable.

The day went to wiring Anecdote into the monitoring rollout running across every project.

• Every request is now timed and tied to the signed-in person, so a slow or failing action can be traced to exactly what ran.
• The app now records sign-ins, sign-outs and saved stories as usage events.
• Every database query, the scheduled background jobs included, is now timed, and a read that hits a momentary failure retries once instead of failing.

The day built the shared monitoring layer every app now leans on.

• A reminder now traces as one timeline from app to gateway to text vendor, so a failed send shows exactly where it stalled.
• One package now holds the sign-in and usage-event wiring for every frontend, so no app hand-rolls its own snippet.
• A database wrapper times every query and retries a read once after a momentary failure; a write is never retried, so nothing can apply twice.
• Fixed a logs view that stayed empty for all web traffic, which also blocked the jump from a log line to a session replay.

Today’s visible work was fixing how a recurring task moves to a future date.

• You can now push a repeating task or habit to a later day and it stays there, instead of returning to Today on the next refresh.
• A snoozed occurrence no longer counts as a missed habit, so moving one to another day doesn’t break your streak.
• Undoing a snooze that crosses into a later week or month now reverses the whole move in a single tap.

A research day for a future writing post, plus this site’s share of the monitoring rollout.

• The workspace’s git history and diaries were mined into six tables recording when each tool arrived, why, and whether it survived or was retired.
• The site’s hand-rolled visitor analytics was replaced by the shared workspace package, so the site and the apps now share one wiring.
• The admin pages’ calls out to GitHub are now timed, so a slow version check or deploy poll shows where the time went.

The text-message gateway took its turn in the workspace tracing rollout. Nothing about sending, budgets or spending limits changed.

• Requests from other services now record who they were for, so a text that never arrived can be traced to the person expecting it.
• Every database query is now timed, and incoming replies leave a record too, with phone numbers and message text left out.

The shared sign-in service joined the tracing rollout. Signing in works exactly as it did.

• Every request and database read is now timed, so a sign-in that hangs points at the exact step that stalled.
• The exchange with Google that completes a Google sign-in is timed too, so a slow handshake on Google’s side is visible.

The shortener got the same treatment as the rest of the workspace, with one deliberate gap.

• Creating, listing or deleting a link now records how long each step and database read took, so a slow call can be tracked down.
• The public redirect stays untraced on purpose, so following a short link records nothing about the person who clicked it.

Two user-flagged interface problems, plus storymap’s share of the workspace tracing rollout.

• The coloured dot beside each project name is gone, since it said nothing the name beside it didn’t.
• Behind the scenes the board joined the workspace tracing rollout, so a slow save or snapshot now shows where the time went.
• The plan for rolling tracing and analytics across every app in the workspace was written down and sequenced.
• Fixed the loading placeholder, which collapsed into thin slivers on desktop and stacked vertically on mobile instead of looking like the board.