Hedge: Build Log
Engineering events documented as they happen. The evergreen architecture picture lives in the case study; this is what actually happened along the way.
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A hundred days, a hundred merges
One hundred days after "Initial scaffold," the hundredth merge landed on main. What a backend developer who had never shipped a React Native app got done in that window, why the short loop made it fast, and two teases about where it goes next.
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The math was honest. The words were not.
The scoring never celebrated being right. The copy quietly did, at every surface a new player meets first. Nobody decided that: celebrating correctness is the default gravity of games, and there is no test for an app that subtly disagrees with itself.
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The second half of the promise
Hedge 1.0 shipped the mirror; charts are homework. The new badge roster is the coaching half: thirty-six badges where nothing pays out for luck, the grind itself is the training, and every future badge retro-grants the morning it ships.
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I deleted the app to fix the app
The phone review app was a thin HTTP client in an app costume. One reframe deleted the whole native ceremony: a web app served off the Mac mini, one URL for every device, in production the same afternoon. This week the old app retires.
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The badge that wouldn't forgive
One predicate, three designs: a lifetime gate that couldn't forgive early miscalibration, a fixed window that made tier three merely slower, and the version where the window is the count. Plus a simulator pass that became a design studio.
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I deployed a ruler
Three reasonable fixes and a black bar that survived them all. A temporary diagnostics card made the iPhone report its own geometry: 47 points of screen no web pixel was allowed to paint, all traced to one status-bar meta tag.
Earlier entries
- The $112 night
- The first honest witness
- Nobody had walked this path, so here's the map
- The schema had already done it
- The compositor doesn't care how pretty it is, only how big
- iPad support in a day, and then every screen Apple sells
- The countdown was centered, and Todd was right anyway
- Six plans, one day, and an agent fleet