The bugs that pass every check
A 2xx response that saved nothing. A form that 500s on GET. Three bugs that passed manage.py check, passed their tests, and shipped.
Everything hangs off the edition
A festival's data is a sequence of past states, not a current one. The pivot, the per-year overrides, and the two switches that close a submission.
The MX you must not publish yet
An MX pointing at a server that does not know your domain bounces mail permanently. The ordering rule, and the DNS records the platform keeps.
Two people, one row
Several people fill one submission together, none of them signed in. Tokens, seats, presence, and the row lock that stops a lost update.
A foreign key to any unique column
Two ways to point at a row of another form — by id, or by any UNIQUE column. Why the second exists, and what building SQL against runtime tables costs.
A QR code that grants nothing
Candidates pay at a counter, not online. The QR code that joins the two carries no authority — and the guard lives in one function, not four screens.
One seat, one candidate
Sixty-three exams, zero convocations. A seat is a physical resource that can be taken twice. The constraint, the race, and the report that names refusals.
Documentation that shows the holes
A workflow that lives in data has no readable form. A hand-drawn diagram is wrong in a month. Generate it — and make it report what has no path.
The day Thursday meant Thurgau
Six locales, one of them the source language. gettext fuzzy-matched 2327 entries in it. No symptom, until a flag went missing.
Six of the twenty-nine are not fields
A camera field produces a file minutes before the form exists. Uploading it early inverts ownership, and the fence that puts it back.
Every table in one vector index
Eight business tables, one HNSW index, and a rule: no embedding is ever computed inside a request. The projection, the loops, and the worker.
An import that tells you what it will do
A school's data arrives as spreadsheets nobody cleaned. The hard part is not parsing them: it is saying what will happen before it happens.