The seed packet that thought it was a carrot
A weekly 'what should we start from seed' digest needed three things a naive join doesn't: derived sow dates, a matcher tie-break by position, and a monitor that asserts the email went out.
Read →Chester Frazier · Gulfport, MS · b. 1988
Notes from the homelab,
the studio, and the day job.
Debugging stories, architecture notes, and the occasional thing I built because nobody else had. New posts when I have something worth writing down.
Posts
15 on this page · full archive (309)
The watermark that ran backwards
A replication watermark that could move backwards let the same rows drift twice. The culprit was a frozen snapshot being handed back to the writer that produced it.
Read →The fix that sat unloaded for four days
A replication bug where updated_at ran backwards, and a fix that never loaded because the restart was waiting in an approval queue it never belonged in.
Read →Assert the artifact, not the exit code
A nightly scraper that fills my audiobook library, and the two monitoring rules that keep it from quietly lying: refuse a partial parse, and check the table instead of the run.
Read →You Can't Remove the Last Owner
An offboarding script reported 9/10 steps. The tenth was a Microsoft 365 group the departing user owned — and Graph refuses to leave a group ownerless.
Read →The watermark that outran the commit
A timestamp watermark silently skipped 41 replicated rows because now() in Postgres is transaction start time, not commit time. The fix, and the three details that made it wrong twice.
Read →The tool was deployed. The model said it didn't exist.
Shipping a tool to an LLM agent takes three registrations, not two. Miss the intent router and the model truthfully tells you the tool isn't there.
Read →The error said permissions. It was a star emoji.
A .NET service on Linux refused to import a folder it could read perfectly well. The path had an emoji in it, and the error message pointed at permissions the whole time.
Read →A forecast turned off every automation I own
A quota gate projected 120% usage from a 15% reading and shut down a whole tier of jobs on a Monday. The bug wasn't the math — it was letting the median decide.
Read →Finding the one good frame in a 21-frame burst
Culling 600 burst-mode photos with OpenCV: why sharpness has to be scored within the burst, not across the shoot, and how YuNet's eye landmarks catch blinks.
Read →A conditional import, a bare except, and three months of nothing
An automation pipeline classified 21,000 events and executed none of them for three months. The bug was one wrong dictionary key, and Python's scoping rules did the rest.
Read →The probe that was never allowed to fail
A monitoring flag meant to hide noisy checks was quietly hiding the most important one. Six automations were green because nothing they ran could ever be reported.
Read →The keepalive nobody could see
A wall-mounted dashboard froze on a job tile for eleven hours. The SSE socket was dead, EventSource said it was open, and the server's keepalive was a comment JavaScript never sees.
Read →The fix shipped three weeks ago. It never arrived.
A bug report I had already fixed — except the build carrying the fix never reached the phone. How to find the real client from an access log, and why a version number should be read out of the artifact.
Read →The database nobody wanted backed up took the other 41 with it
A nightly Postgres backup shipped nothing to four destinations because one frozen snapshot database had a connection limit of zero. The fix is a batch-job design rule, not a Postgres trick.
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