What I've been building

The tool that compares each page against its intended design stopped flagging colour and spacing differences that were never really there, letting real ones show.

Most of the work went into automated checks that keep mockups true to the design tokens.

• A mockup with a tap target under 44 pixels now gets flagged, so controls too small to tap on a phone are caught early.
• Focus outlines that appear on a mouse click are now flagged, keeping the highlight for keyboard users who rely on it.
• Off-palette colours and raw numbers used in place of tokens are now flagged, so spacing, weight, shadow and timing stay consistent.
• Font-weight tokens and a faster motion step were added to the shared system, so projects name these instead of hardcoding numbers.

These are building blocks for screens still being designed, so nothing in the app looks different for now.

The next version of the story-mapping screen is being worked out as mock-ups, before any of it gets built.

The portfolio filled in the pages that were still placeholders.

• You can now read the full Remind me later case study, from the problem it solves to how its reminders and weekly review work.
• The About page now tells a personal story of my work and side projects, replacing the single placeholder paragraph that was there before.
• Each next-project link now shows a one-line description, so you know what the next case study covers before clicking through.
• Your browser tab now shows a custom gradient icon instead of the default Astro rocket the site came with.
• The anecdote project is no longer listed, because it is still being built and not ready to show.
• Case study cards now use an arrow beside the title as the click cue, dropping the separate “Read case study” link.
• Fixed a misaligned featured-card label, a screenshot carousel clipped on the right, homepage text stopping short of the page edges, and a faint next-project heading.

Story capture moves fully into the web app, and text messages are now just reminders.

• You can now leave a half-written story and pick it up later, because a draft is no longer thrown away after a day.
• You now write your stories in the web app instead of by text, so capturing and continuing one happens in a single place.
• The weekly reminder is now a short text with a link that opens the capture page, so you can start a story in one tap.

Most of the work went into keeping design mockups tied to the shared component library.

• A mockup using a component or colour outside the shared set now fails an automatic check, so screens can’t quietly drift from the design.
• The list of components a mockup uses, and its text, can now be pulled out automatically, so nobody hand-copies them into the build.

Three shared building blocks landed, each lifting a pattern out of one app so every app can reuse it.

• The spend protection built for one app is now a package any app installs once, instead of each app rebuilding budget caps and kill switches.
• A new package collects the small helpers that tests reuse, so a new app pulls them in by installing one dependency, not by copying them.
• A shared helper now lets an app handle a repeated incoming notification once, returning that first result rather than doing the work twice.

The add-task form and a few planning screens got some attention.

• You can now set a task to repeat with a clear full-width toggle, instead of a small checkbox that was easy to miss.
• Fixed the timeline’s today marker hiding behind the filter bar, weekly review showing a just-done task as overdue, and snoozed tasks lingering in daily review.

The deploy buttons on the site’s admin dashboard got most of the attention.

• The deploy button now clears once a deploy finishes, where before it could show Deploying forever even though the deploy had already succeeded.
• A deploy in progress now survives a reload or tab close, so returning shows it still running instead of a button you might fire twice.
• A deploy you started in another browser or on another device now appears on the dashboard, so you don’t launch the same one twice.
• Opening the production deploy confirmation is now instant, where before it reloaded every project’s status and flashed the whole dashboard.
• The deploy button is now a compact icon tucked on each row, so more of the dashboard fits on screen without scrolling.
• Fixed a featured project card that flickered a purple-blue gradient on hover, and a broken about link on the homepage.

The weekly review, where you set up the coming week, lost the steps that got in the way.

• Overdue one-off tasks now sit at the top of the planning step, so a single leftover task no longer blocks you from planning anything.
• You no longer look back over last week before planning, so the review stays focused on the week ahead.
• The final screen is now a single prompt, so you commit your plan without re-reading a summary of choices you just made.
• Fixed rows in the weekly review shifting sideways depending on their state, which left assigned and unassigned items misaligned.

A round of visual polish on the homepage, plus some housekeeping on the admin side.

• Featured project cards now match the others at rest, and a gradient ring appears and rotates when you hover, drawing the eye to them.
• The version dashboard now tracks Storymap, so you can tell at a glance whether its live and preview sites run the latest code.

Storymap is a tool for laying work out as a map of activities and slices, and it came together into something you can use.

• You can see a project’s work as a grid of activities and slices, so its whole shape is visible at once.
• You can switch between projects from the top bar, each keeping its own map and archive.
• You can add an item and set its task, slice, effort and tags, so it lands in the right place on the map.
• You can open any item to edit its title, notes and details, with your changes kept as you go.
• You can drag an item from one cell to another to regroup it, and the map updates straight away without a reload.
• You can close an item as done, won’t do or a duplicate, and it moves off the map into the archive.
• You can browse everything you’ve closed in a separate archive, filtered by how each item ended.
• You can save several edits together, and if the same item changed elsewhere, a panel walks you through merging the two versions.
• Fixed a map that loaded with no items, modal buttons that stacked as two competing options on phones, and several mislabelled buttons and options.