6 posts
The portfolio test harness measured contrast on a port. When the address came from an environment variable, the branch server never started, and something else answered there. The test never lied. It just answered a different question.
React hydration error #418 in the portfolio footer, a mystery that only happened at night: the server renders in UTC, the visitor in local time, and a new Date() in JSX gave each of them a different answer. The hunt for the useState(null), the pinned timeZone, and the epilogue where I myself created a second bug while fixing the first.
The portfolio hero typed, erased, and retyped — not as an effect, but as a bug: deferred hydration mounted the component and reset the text already on screen. The story of how LCP dropped from 3.6s to 2.7s by removing idle-hydration from the wrong place.
A wrong Cache-Control header in vercel.json was overriding the revalidate=1800 ISR setting and turning every cache expiry into two synchronous GitHub calls inside the TTFB. The story of how cold cache became warm: 3.6s down to 140ms.
Portfolio was 100% functional, 218 tests passing, zero CI errors. But mobile Chrome users saw old versions when restoring tabs. The cause: Chrome's bfcache ignores HTTP headers — and the fix came cross-project from LifeLog.
529 commits, 218 tests, 5 mini-games, multi-layer parallax scene, interactive terminal with 15+ commands, full PT/EN i18n — the journey of a portfolio that became an interactive showcase.