January 28: First Full Cycle

A focused session with a single pull request.

Developer Journal

First successful full cycle — idea → plan → code → testing → review → merged PR. The plan's auto-generated name was "proud toasting Shannon," which felt appropriate. Shared the milestone with friends and toasted to it.

Added a meta PR updating the git workflow to include documentation updates in every feature PR — previously that was a manual process that was exactly like every other manual documentation task: rarely more than a couple days behind, but still slipping. Also got too cute with a git remote fix and Claude accidentally turned the entire source directory into a git root, thinking it was a monorepo. Recovered, lesson learned.

Wondered aloud whether this channel had become the programming equivalent of the fitness channel everyone else ignores. In the AI channel, a friend had a serious encounter with LLM hallucination on potentially health-critical information — triggered a broader discussion about the limits of LLMs. "You have to ask for something that is checkable. Coding is so advanced compared to anything else because code is highly checkable, and I've spent 15 years learning how software developers do that."

Highlights

#20 Add observation date display and sort by download date

• Fix MJD to DateTime conversion for MAST imports - uses t_min field (observation start time) with proper MJD epoch (November 17, 1858)
• Add default sorting by upload date (newest first) across all data retrieval methods
• Display observation and download dates in the dashboard lineag...

What Changed

Features (1)

• #20 Add observation date display and sort by download date

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14 commits across 1 pull request. Next: January 29, 2026 — Preserve all MAST metadata on import and add refre..., Update documentation for MAST metadata preservatio..., Add documentation update step to PR workflow