Dev Log 05.21.2025: Identity Providers and Smoke Detectors

Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Published On: May 21, 2026

🤓 The Technical

Today was a tale of two projects. On the day job side, I spent the morning tracking down why Adobe Live Search wasn't showing up after we merged the branch — turns out the integration environment doesn't have CI/CD configured, so composer install and setup upgrade never ran. Classic. Got that escalated to the server team and pivoted to the next thing, which was scoping out a full PLP overhaul to go alongside the Live Search switch. PR is submitted, QA can finally start testing. Good enough.

On the personal project side, we had a fun one. I was planning out the Battle Royale game mode for the chatbot when we realized the whole thing is built on Twitch usernames as identifiers — which can change. So before writing a single line of game logic, we went back a step and built an identity provider module. It now logs Twitch IDs alongside usernames from the jump, which means historical data stays accurate through renames, we get a clean audit trail for backfills, and it opens the door to some cool reporting features down the road. It shipped tonight in a state where it'll silently start mapping IDs on Sunday's deploy without touching anything user-facing. Setting ourselves up for success.

😎 The Atmosphere

Rough morning. Woke up to a beeping smoke detector, spent way too long on it, and by the time I sat down to stream I was already fried. But somewhere around commercial break two, things leveled out. The edible helped. McAllister's helped. Getting actual work to do helped. By the time I ended stream I felt like a completely different person than the guy who wanted to throw a smoke detector through a wall at nine AM. Sometimes you just have to survive the morning.

🐶 The Coworker

Hubert spent most of the day napping in the bedroom, which honestly felt appropriate given the vibe of the morning. Made a brief appearance during stream. Did not help with the smoke detector situation. Still the best.

😡 The Rant

Company-wide meeting today. No annual raises for anyone in the Americas. Second time in three years. They had the chat disabled. No cameras, no chat, just a one-way broadcast of bad news with no outlet. Look, I wasn't expecting a raise this year — things have been rough and I knew it. But disabling the chat is just cowardly. At least let people feel like they're in a room together when you're delivering news like that. We're adults. We can handle it. Just don't treat us like we can't be trusted to react.

🙂🙂🙂 The Smiles

Four day weekend starts now. Haircut tomorrow. Friday Night Magic tomorrow night. Saturday with Tuesday. The Momer Vig pieces are on their way. The identity provider is shipping Sunday. And somewhere in there I'm going to figure out how to make my Boros Angels deck stop embarrassing me at bracket three tables. Good week to be done with the week.