TOPIC COLLECTION
Problems met while building something, and how they were worked out. The focus is the structure chosen, the approaches that failed, and what to watch once it is running, rather than the finished result.
01
Where the build stalled
Rather than the finished feature, what did not work before it and why that structure was chosen. The starting point is a problem actually hit: connection failures in a browser-only video call, a double booking when two people press the same seat, the order in which an error code narrows down which log to open.
02
The options not taken
Writing down only the chosen approach leaves no way to tell why it is better. So the approaches considered and dropped, the reason for dropping them, and what the current structure cannot handle are written down too.
03
What running it revealed
The things that only become visible after deployment go last: the load as participants grow, differences in browser support, and what to look at first when something fails.
Problems Met in Production6 posts
What to check when you are stuck at the server
Tools I Built4 posts
Things built because I needed them
1–6 of 6
The 2012 laptop running this blog was dying several times a day. The cause was a wireless firmware fault, and what I fixed was not the firmware but the roaming.
Feed one request path to three web servers and each lands on a different configuration block. Follow the rules from each server's own documentation, elimination included.
A server error code tells you not what broke but how far it got before failing. Why searching the app log on a 502 finds nothing, and the one command that halves the places to check.
Without locking, one seat sells twice. Walking through how transactions and pessimistic and optimistic locking let exactly one person succeed.
Building a small video meeting on WebRTC, WebSocket, and STUN that people join by link, and explaining the participant and network limits of a peer-to-peer design along with where the privacy boundary sits.
Turning cards, buttons, and a mascot pixel-styled through shared CSS rules, while keeping a 390px screen, keyboard focus, and reduced motion comfortable to read.