Dev Log 08.26.2026: TMDb Hard Links, The Martian, and a Finished Ral Deck

Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Category: Dev Logs

Published On: August 26, 2026

Dev Log 08.26.2026: TMDb Hard Links, The Martian, and a Finished Ral Deck

🤓 The Technical: Slow day at the day job - tested a feature, kicked the ticket over to QA, and finally submitted a big chunk of my backlogged time. The tracking system still isn't fully fixed, but I'm down to just one missing stretch plus August, which is progress. The real work happened on the movie website. Admin dashboard improvements landed first, including instance counts right on the movie grid so I can see at a glance how many title drops are recorded per film. Then broad search improvements, and the one I'm happiest with: proper TMDb integration. I can now optionally hard-link a movie to its TMDb ID for metadata and images, and anything without an ID falls back to title-and-year matching. Great for disambiguating stubborn entries. Wrapped the day with SEO improvements. All of it ships Sunday - the homepage is sitting this release out. Also logged The Matrix (30 title drops) and The Terminator (a modest 4).

😎 The Atmosphere: A rainy day that kept teasing me by clearing up right when I wanted the storm vibes most. Chili for lunch and again for dinner, and my first-ever watch of The Martian. Somehow never saw it, didn't even really know what it was about, then looked at the cast list and wondered how that happened. 9/10. Zero title drops, but it passes the Bechdel test, so the data entry practically writes itself.

🐶 The Coworker: Hubert spent the morning in the office, half on his bed and half spilling onto the floor, and spent the afternoon playing hard to get on the couch. Near me, but pointedly not next to me. Professional distance.

😡 The Rant: YouTube's "Not Interested" button. I started using it to clean up my recommendations and somehow made them worse - it's now suggesting things with no detectable connection to anything I've ever watched. A feedback feature that actively degrades the thing it's supposed to improve shouldn't exist.

🙂🙂🙂 The Smiles: The last four cards and the sticker sheets arrived, which means my Ral cEDH deck is officially 100% complete. Every card exactly the way I want it. It'll evolve eventually, but for right now, it's done - and that feels great.