A session-by-session chronicle of building a JWST data analysis platform — from first commit to production features.
Browse by date or filter by category to see what happened each day.
Single-PR day with a UX polish — the target detail page was flashing the "no recipes" empty state for a split second while recipes were still loading, which looked broken. Also spent time on UX docs for the app (unrelated to PRs, doc work only).
The compositing quality story hit its capstone: smart auto-stretch with histogram analysis and per-channel controls (#688/#1206) is finally merged. Same day shipped the production Docker service-name defaults, hardened mosaic generation against enumeration, migrated to photutils 3.0, and cleared a 17-PR Dependabot backlog in one sitting.
Two doc PRs syncing hook references with reality — plus Opus 4.7 dropped and I got early access to the 1M-context variant.
Added saturation, vibrancy, and hue rotation controls to the composite pipeline — then immediately refactored compositeService to replace the 10+ positional parameters with an options object so adding the new controls wasn't a mess.
Thirteen-PR security and correctness blitz — auth rate limiting, account lockout, user enumeration prevention, data enumeration prevention across analysis and composite endpoints, NaN and empty-input guards across the processing pipeline, and a handful of race-condition and validation bugs.
Landed the security quick-wins bundle (password complexity, private-by-default for targets, proxy trust config), hardened the Dependabot pipeline, and merged the React 19.2.5 bump along with a clutch of smaller dep bumps.
Single-PR day — went through the 10 reference files the doc-drift hook had been nagging about and brought them current with the code.
Three compositing UX wins — unsharp masking is now exposed in the pipeline, the Auto preset quietly runs a gentle sharpen, and the process step shows elapsed time as stages progress. Plus the usual Friday-night dependabot wave.
Finally cracked open the composite route and split it into focused pipeline stages. Also gated window.jwst debug globals behind dev-only builds, replaced hand-rolled caches with TTLCache, bounded polling retries, and surfaced the errors that frontend components were quietly swallowing.
Ripping out the last of the hardcoded dev credentials, wiring the JWT secret through docker-compose, gating auth debug logs behind a development flag, and sanitizing the remaining places that were returning raw ex.Message to clients.