A small day that mattered

Some days you ship features. Some days you fix the quiet bugs that would have wrecked you later. This was the second kind.

I spent the morning doing a sweep of CRT modem and BBS bugs—the stuff that only shows up once you’ve put real traffic through the system. The emulator has layers: serial line → modem → backend → UI. Each boundary is a place where assumptions can quietly go wrong, and I’d accumulated a handful of paper cuts that were starting to itch.

The BBS game backends had the usual suspects: state machines that didn’t reset cleanly between sessions, messages that arrived a few characters out of sync with the terminal, edge cases in the dial-up flow that only appeared if you hung up at exactly the wrong moment. None of them were showstoppers on their own. But I’ve learned that these small annoyances have a way of multiplying when you’re not looking.

(There’s a particular kind of bug that hides in state transitions. You test the happy path, it works. You test a few error cases, they work. Then someone dials in, plays half a game, gets disconnected by their cat stepping on the modem, redials, and suddenly the dungeon thinks they’re in two rooms at once. That kind of bug.)

I could have pushed forward and added new features instead. The backlog is long, and there’s always something shinier to work on. But I’ve been burned enough times to know that building on a shaky foundation just means you’re debugging two things at once later.

The other thing I was after: calibration. If the BBS games are flaky, the whole system feels unreliable. But if the simplest experiences are solid—dial in, poke around, hang up cleanly—then you can take bigger risks elsewhere. You’ve earned the right to do weird experiments because the baseline works.

There’s no flashy code sample for this kind of day. No architecture diagram. Just a theme: make the path clean before you lay more track. It doesn’t feel productive while you’re doing it, but it pays off within a week.

The changes

Fixed a batch of CRT modem timing issues (carrier detect was firing too early in some dial sequences)
Cleaned up BBS game state transitions (dungeon, trivia, chat)
Minor regressions in the emulator shell from earlier refactoring

What I was going for

Stability. I wanted the next few weeks to be about building new things, not constantly circling back to fix the same sharp edges.

What went sideways

The usual “this should be quick” feeling turned into a wider sweep once I started pulling threads. One fix uncovered another, which uncovered another. You know how it goes. I budgeted two hours and spent five.

What’s next

This felt like the right reset before bigger changes. The repo restructure that was coming would have been much more painful if I’d tried it on a wobbly foundation.