Blog

Test the Intent, Not the Implementation

A suite of end-to-end tests that passed every night and still let a broken checkout ship. They were pinned to the DOM (class names and nth-child paths) so they tested how the page was built, not what it was supposed to do. Deriving tests from the spec instead of the markup fixes that, and it's the same discipline that makes a flaky test findable.

Your LLM Pipeline Is a Data Pipeline, Not a Chatbot

The first version of my daily summarization job was one big prompt in a loop. It died halfway through, re-did work it had already paid for, and had no idea what it had finished. Treating LLM batch work as ETL (staged, checkpointed, idempotent) fixed all three.

Bind to the Token, Don't Guess the Pixel

A design system only works if the values in the code point back at it. A screen full of

Your list is a stream, not a snapshot

Offset pagination quietly duplicates and skips rows the moment your data changes underneath you. Why LIMIT/OFFSET breaks on live lists, how cursor (keyset) pagination fixes it, and where virtualization fits, with a playground you can drive.

Why Date.now() Is Still Wrong

Deriving a countdown from Date.now() fixes the render loop, but Date.now() is device time, and device time isn't necessarily the clock your app should trust. Server-time sync, monotonic clocks, and a tiny library.

Why Your Countdown Timer Lies After the Tab Goes Idle

A countdown showed garbage after a tab sat in the background, but only when nobody was watching. The cause was background-tab timer throttling; the real bug was accumulating time instead of deriving it.

Adapt the library, don't upgrade the framework

web3-react v6 couldn't give me the Magic login I needed, and v8 was a ground-up rewrite. So I wrapped magic-sdk in v6's AbstractConnector instead of migrating the whole app, a backported connector plus the Anti-Corruption Layer pattern.