Field_Notes
Field notes.
Long-form write-ups from building and running a live auction platform — video, mobile, migrations, and the bugs found along the way.
ls -lt ~/field-notes
14 / 14 entries
The 429 Storm and 300 Idle Swipers
Performance forensics in a live auction viewer — one hidden request per bid per viewer, and a catalog tab that booted 300 carousels nobody asked for
3 min readAngular Performance Real-Time WebSockets Debugging
Your Test Suite Passed Because It Asserted Nothing
412 skipped tests, a 96MB production dump distilled to a 256KB schema, and the day a Laravel API's suite ran honestly for the first time
3 min readTesting Laravel PHP CI/CD Legacy Systems
PDF Generation, Five Engines Later
htmldoc, TCPDF, a Go service, Dompdf, then Chromium — and a 142-page catalog that went from 53.6 seconds to 1.9
3 min readPDF Laravel Performance Chromium Infrastructure
Offline Is a State, Not an Error
Building for field reps with no signal — a sync cursor that could silently lose cattle, an iOS upload bug that was three bugs, and retiring the unescapable toast
4 min readOffline-First Mobile RxDB Capacitor Sync
Balancing a Simulation with a Harness Instead of Playtesting
How a deterministic calibration harness turned game balance into an engineering problem — and one constant turned bankruptcy into breakeven
3 min readSimulation Game Development Determinism Testing TypeScript
1,839 to 14 — Purging any from a 228k-Line Codebase in Four Days
Running an AI-agent refactoring campaign with a verifiable metric, stacked PRs, and the compiler as the ratchet
3 min readTypeScript Angular AI Agents Refactoring Code Quality
The Upgrade Week
Taking a shipping hybrid mobile app through Angular 20 and Capacitor 8 in one sprint — with the template compiler as the only safety net
3 min readAngular Capacitor Ionic Mobile Upgrades
The Flash Years
A retrospective on keeping a live auction platform alive through the death of Flash — including the Chrome extension whose only job was turning Flash back on
3 min readFlash WebRTC Angular Video Streaming Legacy Systems
Moving the Timed-Auction Engine from Python to Go
Rewriting an eBay-style auction engine for a concurrency model we could reason about — and the bug that dragged deadlines backwards
3 min readGo Concurrency Python Auctions Real-Time
Three Tokens Per Login
How we migrated a live auction marketplace from 30-day HS256 JWTs to short-lived ES384 tokens without logging out a single user
3 min readOAuth2 JWT Authentication PHP Migrations
Building the CattleUSA Auctions Module
A detailed look at the architecture and implementation of the Auctions module in the CattleUSA platform
4 min readAngular Auctions Sale Barns Data Fetching Sorting Filtering Authentication Authorization
Implementing Real-Time Video Streaming for Livestock Auctions
A technical deep dive into the challenges and solutions of building a reliable video streaming system for CattleUSA
5 min readWebRTC WebSockets Video Streaming Real-Time Communication Angular
Modernizing CattleUSA's Technical Infrastructure
A deep dive into the technical challenges and solutions involved in transforming a legacy livestock trading platform into a modern, scalable system
5 min readLaravel Eloquent Prisma Database Architecture Modernization
Building CattleUSA
A detailed look at transforming a legacy livestock trading platform into a modern, real-time web application
2 min readAngular WebRTC WebSockets Ionic SvelteKit