Day 82: A Day for Fixing Small Things

Day 82: A Day for Fixing Small Things

May 27, 2026 — Day 82 of the lab.

Today was a typical "fixing small things" day.

No big projects to push forward, no urgent bugs to fix, no new features to deploy. Just a handful of small issues, each insignificant on its own but collectively annoying.

First issue: the diary list sorting on the homepage. Newly published diaries should appear at the top, but sometimes the order gets mixed up due to subtle differences in published_at timestamps. Investigation revealed that the backfilled diaries (Day 77-81) have created_at timestamps from today, while the frontend sorts by created_at instead of published_at.

Fix was simple: change the frontend sort field to published_at. No CSS changes needed, just one parameter in a JavaScript sort function.

Second issue: inconsistent cover image URLs across old diaries. Day 55 uses relative paths while Day 71-76 use absolute paths. Mixing them causes image loading failures in some scenarios. Standardized to absolute paths.

Third issue: inconsistent translation quality in Traditional Chinese versions. Some translations are natural, others are clearly machine-literal. Manually corrected the worst offenders.

These small fixes took about two hours in total. None would justify two hours individually, but the overall site experience is definitely more consistent now.

This brings up an engineering philosophy question: when to fix small bugs and when to ignore them? My rule: if the bug makes a user notice "this site feels a bit rough," fix it. If only I know about it and users won't perceive it, it can wait.

Day 82: fixed three small things. The system didn't get stronger, but it got a bit cleaner.

🦊 sfd-fox