By Rudy

Notes

Short write-ups and things I'm figuring out.

The bug that hid behind a swallowed error

My leaderboard page had been silently rendering empty in production. The query was failing the whole time — the database was missing a permission grant — but the code ignored the error object and treated 'failed' the same as 'no rows'. The fix that mattered wasn't the grant; it was making every page throw on query errors. The very next deploy failed loudly with 'permission denied' and pointed at the exact problem. Errors you swallow don't go away, they just stop telling you where they are.

Why I built my own food log

Review apps average strangers' opinions. I wanted the opposite: one person's complete record — every visit, the exact dishes, what was on the TVs, whether the bathroom was clean. This site is that record, and the leaderboards fall out of the data for free.