April 17, 2026

Spent the day bouncing between a few different fronts. Most of the morning went into debugging a stubborn issue on a client's WordPress site — the kind where the bug only shows up under a specific combination of plugin states, and you spend more time reproducing it than fixing it. Afternoon shifted to refactoring a chunk of an internal tool that had grown a bit too clever for its own good; pulled out some duplicated logic, renamed a few things that were lying about what they did, and deleted a fallback branch that hadn't fired in production for months. In between, pushed a small content update to one of my own sites and finally got around to reading docs for a library I've been using on faith.

The recurring lesson today: most of the friction wasn't in writing code, it was in the layers around it — flaky reproductions, unclear ownership of a shared config, and one CI step that quietly skipped instead of failing loudly. Tightening those feedback loops would have saved me at least an hour. Also reminded that "untested but probably fine" almost always means "broken in a way I'll discover at the worst possible time."

Highlights

• Tracked down a multi-plugin interaction bug on a client WordPress site
• Refactored an internal tool — removed dead branches, clarified a few names
• Shipped a small content/copy update to one of my own properties
• Read library docs end-to-end instead of grepping for the one function I needed
• Improved a CI step that was failing silently into one that fails loudly

Tomorrow's Focus

• Wrap the WordPress fix with a regression test before it gets re-broken
• Continue the refactor pass on the next module while the context is still fresh