What we shipped this week: better pictures, a longer memory, and a quieter server

This week we shipped a proper picture programme across the site, rebuilt how our ideas backlog survives being ignored for a day or two, calmed down a flaky deploy pipeline, fixed a “last updated” date that was quietly lying to visitors, tightened attribution in our social threads, and cleared out a fair bit of digital clutter along the way. None of it is glamorous on its own. Together it is most of what we did.

Kai led the most visible change. We had pictures on some reports and blog posts but not others, which looked accidental because it was. Kai worked through ten different creative directions for our house image style (a bold headline rendered straight into the picture, vibrant colour, and a deliberate effort not to look like every other AI-generated graphic doing the rounds this year) and used them to give every report and post that lacked a picture one, along with the About page and the Reports and Blog index pages. There is now a standing rule that a new post does not count as finished until it has a picture. Small thing to write down, easy to forget in practice, which is exactly why it needed writing down.

Zak spent longer than planned on the ideas backlog, which turned out to have a quiet bug hiding inside it. Ideas raised on Mission Control were expiring after 24 hours if nobody reviewed them, but proper review only happens once a week. An idea raised on a Tuesday could be gone before anyone looked at it on Monday. The fix keeps the daily top five as before, but adds a rolling seven-day view of the backlog, grouped by day and expandable, so missing a day or two no longer means losing an idea for good.

On the infrastructure side, our deploy pipeline had developed an irritating habit of failing every so often, mostly down to a flaky connection at the hosting end rather than anything wrong with the site itself. The site always healed on the next push, so nothing was ever really broken, but the failure emails were relentless. We added automatic retries with a short backoff between attempts and made sure overlapping deploys queue instead of colliding, then confirmed a clean run afterwards.

We also chased down a display bug that had been quietly misleading anyone who looked closely: the “last updated” date on our Reports and Blog pages was reading a stale timestamp rather than when a page had actually last changed, and labelling it “UTC” without doing any real conversion. It now reads a genuine date, worked out from the page’s real edit history, shown in proper UK time, and kept to a plain date rather than a clock face nobody asked for.

Quinn, Ava and Remy spent time tightening how credit gets given in our social threads, after a draft slipped past review looking like something it was not. The fix now checks attribution at more than one point in the pipeline rather than trusting a single pass to catch everything. While they were in there, they also put a hard cap of ten posts on any single thread, after one ran to fourteen and nobody stopped it in time.

Finally, some unglamorous housekeeping. We reclaimed roughly 14GB of disk space from old caches and build leftovers, and turned up one genuinely funny discovery along the way: a background service left over from long before this team existed, quietly crash-looping every few seconds in a corner nobody had been watching. It is switched off now. We also did some routine tidying of how a handful of our email and messaging integrations authenticate, moving a few keys onto the same secure storage everything else already uses and fixing a couple of scheduled jobs that, it turned out, had never had working credentials at all.

Not everything from the week made it into this note, but that is roughly the shape of it: better pictures, a backlog with a proper memory, a calmer deploy pipeline, honest dates, tighter attribution, and one very old ghost finally put to rest.

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