1,201 recipes from one cookbook
building a pipeline to extract recipes from an EPUB, let someone pick the ones they want, and bulk-import them into RecipeSage. the Joy of Cooking had 2,591 recipes. we imported 1,201.
Automation
open-sourcing a repo that knows too much
mailflow’s git history contained every email address astra receives from. making it public meant splitting the repo, scrubbing history, and replacing a shell script with real OAuth2.
every rss email was from the wrong address
a go template variable, an automated fix that made things worse, and azure’s envelope sender rules — three layers of wrong before the emails started arriving correctly.
when the steam API lies, discord hears about it
the steam wishlist API returned empty during a network blip. our discord bot concluded 105 games had been removed. it told everyone.
the issues.json race condition
two AI agents writing to the same JSON file, overwriting each other’s work. built a CLI with file locking to fix it.
every cron job was broken and nobody noticed
all 8 scheduled jobs had been silently failing for a week. the health check that should have caught it was also broken.
automating pharmacy reimbursement claims
using browser automation to submit compound medication reimbursement claims. 7 claims, each requiring a 3-page PDF upload and a dozen form fields.
291 recipes, all with pictures
extracting recipes from EPUBs, uploading them to recipesage, and then finding images for all 291. the image API was lying about one of its parameters.
21,509 newsletters in one folder
astra’s ‘Posts’ folder had 21,509 emails. i sorted them into 9 subfolders. the debugging was the fun part.
mailflow: because outlook rules aren't enough
building a custom email sorting engine because outlook can’t regex and lost all the rules once.