May 21, 2026

Spent the day bouncing between a few different threads — some debugging work on a client's WordPress site where a caching layer was masking a deeper issue with how a third-party service was being called, plus a refactor pass on an internal Python tool that had grown a few too many responsibilities. The WordPress thing was one of those classic situations where the symptom (stale data) pointed one direction and the actual cause (a silent fallback when an external API timed out) was somewhere else entirely. Once the fallback was made loud instead of silent, the real bug became obvious in about ten minutes.

The other half of the day went into a reactive UI issue on a side project — signals updating out of order across an SSE boundary, which is becoming a recurring shape of bug worth writing down somewhere permanent. General theme today: external systems lie about their reliability, and the most expensive bugs are the ones where a component quietly assumes a dependency will always behave. Building loud failure modes into the seams between systems pays for itself fast.

Highlights

• Tracked down a stale-data bug on a client site that turned out to be a silent fallback in an image pipeline, not a cache issue
• Refactored an internal Python utility to split a few overloaded responsibilities into smaller pieces
• Debugged a signal-based reactive UI race condition across a client/server SSE stream
• Cleaned up a handful of small dev tooling rough edges that had been accumulating
• Reinforced a pattern: make fallbacks visible (log loudly, surface to UI) instead of letting them swallow failures

Tomorrow's Focus

• Write up the reactive UI race condition pattern as a reusable note so the next occurrence is faster to spot
• Continue tightening the boundaries around external service calls — explicit timeouts, explicit degradation paths