Writing

Notes from shipping
production code

Short writeups on bugs I've fixed in open-source projects, patterns I've learned building AI-powered systems at work, and the kind of subtle software behaviour that's only visible from the trenches.

All Posts
6 min read

Why Swagger UI was crashing on a valid OpenAPI spec: an unguarded .getIn() chain

A 5-line fix in Swagger UI's spec selector. An unguarded Immutable.js .getIn(['content']) chain crashed the browser render on a valid-but-unusual OpenAPI 3.0 spec — a codegen-emitted requestBody with no content field. The lesson generalizes: any schema-optional field is the reader's problem.

swagger-ui openapi immutable-js debugging open-source
6 min read

Why editing a README was rebuilding my entire NestJS project: an inverted chokidar filter

A 2-line fix in NestJS CLI's SWC watcher. Two layered bugs in one predicate: a string-format mismatch on file extensions, plus an inverted boolean that turned the ignored filter into an included filter. A README save was triggering full TypeScript recompilation.

nestjs chokidar debugging open-source
5 min read

BullMQ was crashing on getRanges() because Python's list.reverse() returns None

A 1-line fix in BullMQ's Python port that turned on the universal lesson about Python's mutating-vs-returning method conventions. .reverse(), .sort(), .append() — they all mutate in place and return None.

bullmq python debugging open-source
6 min read

The bug where VS Code's Debug Console was pasting 'repl:1' into my clipboard

A 2-line CSS fix in VS Code that taught me how user-select: text cascades through every descendant — even the decorative ones. The fix for my own misread of the bug: stop looking at JavaScript, start looking at the cascade.

vscode css debugging open-source