A workshop for small web tools, and the notes kept while building them.https://leader-free.ondelva.com/enhttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/why-the-queue-got-expensive/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/why-the-queue-got-expensive/A retry policy I wrote in ten minutes cost me four months of database bill before I read the graph properly.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTdatahttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/cutting-a-release-by-hand/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/cutting-a-release-by-hand/Doing the deploy manually for a month before automating any of it.Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuild loghttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/a-status-page-should-be-boring/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/a-status-page-should-be-boring/Every feature I removed from Pennant made it more useful during an outage.Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTtoolinghttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/the-backup-you-never-restored/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/the-backup-you-never-restored/Restoring from my own backups once a quarter, and what broke the first three times.Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTinfrahttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/naming-things-after-rope/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/naming-things-after-rope/How I pick product names, and why the list is mostly sailing terms.Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTbuild loghttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/shutting-down-marlin/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/shutting-down-marlin/Four years of a queue worker, replaced in an afternoon by nine lines of cron.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTinfrahttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/spreadsheets-until-they-are-not/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/spreadsheets-until-they-are-not/Ledgerline began as a spreadsheet with 40 tabs, one per vendor, and it stayed a spreadsheet for about eight months before the tab count and the formula errors…Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTdatahttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/one-tab-one-glance/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/one-tab-one-glance/The only design constraint I kept from the first week.Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTtoolinghttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/the-week-i-deleted-the-dashboard/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/the-week-i-deleted-the-dashboard/A client asked for charts and got a Friday email instead.Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTdatahttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/staging-urls-that-expire/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/staging-urls-that-expire/Twenty-six forgotten preview deployments, and the cleanup that finally stuck.Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTtoolinghttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/paying-for-uptime/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/paying-for-uptime/A guest note on what an on-call rotation costs before anyone pages you.Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMTinfrahttps://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/seven-things-at-once/https://leader-free.ondelva.com/notes/seven-things-at-once/The maintenance arithmetic of a shelf of small products, and the two rules that keep it from collapsing.Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTbuild log