Dev Log 07.09.2026: TMDb Pipelines, a Grandfather's Jodah, and a Porch Light Squatter

Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Category: Dev Logs

Published On: July 9, 2026

🤓 The Technical: Day job started strong - fixed a merge conflict in a PR before my first stand-up, and the ticket that came back from QA turned out to be a false positive. Then something rare happened: I got assigned an actual feature ticket. Not a bug someone else gave up on, not a "give it to Andrew" special - a brand new thing I get to build right the first time. Claude and I knocked out the first two phases, and the manual review can wait for the morning since the reviewer won't get to it until tomorrow anyway.

The evening belonged to They Said It!. Up until now, adding an image for a movie meant a whole manual pipeline: hunt down a still on Google Images (or screenshot a paused frame in Plex for the obscure stuff), run it through a web optimizer, resize to 1200px, upload to Google Drive. It worked, but it made adding movies a slog - and the site's in a place where all it really needs is more movies. So tonight I built a TMDb integration to replace the whole thing. New entity to store the image data, Twig functions that render TMDb's CDN URLs with graceful fallbacks to the legacy Google Drive images, a sync command with dry-run support and flags to backfill missing images or replace legacy ones, and a cron to keep it topped off. The whole thing runs through Symfony's ThrottlingHttpClient, so no matter where the API gets called from - cron, command, web request - the rate limiter has my back. Dry-ran it against a copy of prod and matched every movie correctly. I also formalized an external-API best practices doc (rate limiting, caching, security) to share across all my projects, because these hobby sites are only going to talk to more APIs over time.

Between work phases, I sorted my Kaladesh stack into color piles - roughly 2,000 cards from this set alone, which tells you something about what playing since Third Edition does to a collection. Also designed a new Commander deck: Jodah, the Unifier, but built exclusively around the original legendary creatures from the Legends set. An $80k deck that is somehow also terrible. Working title: "Jodah's Antiques Roadshow" I cannot wait to tell a table "it's not that Jodah deck" and actually mean it.

😎 The Atmosphere: Mostly a quiet solo day, but the afternoon called for Good Will Hunting on the couch.

🐶 The Coworker: Big milestone for Hubert. A week or two ago I started sleeping with the bedroom door open, which historically has meant more overnight accidents. Last night was the real test - it rained, and Hubert hates the rain - and he passed. Clean floors, nine years in, still learning new tricks. He also cuddled through my morning stand-ups and supplied couch companionship for the movie. Model coworker.

😡 The Rant: Went to pour cereal and the milk had gone bad. Which is also why I don't keep bread in the house - it molds in under a week. Perishables are a scam.

🙂🙂🙂 The Smiles: A while back some straight-line winds blew the cover off my porch light, and I just discovered a robin has moved in and built a nest inside it. The light is now useless, and I briefly considered turning it on to keep the eggs warm before remembering a nest is basically a fixture full of kindling. So the light stays off and the birds stay put. It's their porch light now, and honestly, it's pretty adorable. Plus: tomorrow is Friday Night Magic, and I've got a freshly updated Boros Angels deck and two retuned cEDH decks that haven't touched a table yet.