Keep the broken uploads

The r/kobo post topped out around 160 upvotes; the funnel behind it reads 16 registered, 10-11 attempted uploads, and only two real profiles live ▸ 4:12. The culprit, diagnosed this morning: Koby was built against one device, the Kobo Clara Colour, and other Kobo models write their annotations file differently, so the parser chokes ▸ 5:04.

The teaching is the accidental piece of architecture that turns this from a disaster into a queue: the raw files were stored before parsing. Every failed upload is sitting in Firebase Storage, which means the bug arrives with its own reproduction corpus, no “please send me your file” emails, and when the fix ships, each affected user can get a personal “try again, it works now” note ▸ 6:12. Persist inputs before processing them: the cheapest insurance a parser can buy, and the difference between losing nine users and merely delaying them.

guarda el archivo antes de procesarlo: el bug llega con sus fixtures →

Postscript, three days later: the stored files did exactly their job. Testing against the 13 uploaded datasets exposed the deeper bug, readers who never highlight got blank profiles, and the fix shipped without asking a single user to re-send anything ▸ 51:55.

The comments also model feature-request craft. Someone asks whether the app extracts stylus annotations, a request he doesn’t even understand until GPT explains that premium e-readers have pens. Instead of promising or refusing, he reflects it back: how do you imagine it working? ▸ 3:14. The requester, forced to spec it, deflates it themselves: “ahora que lo pienso, eso se ve un poquito complicado” ▸ 3:31. Filed as future ideas, zero commitment spent. Meanwhile the single-word highlighter from yesterday explains her real workflow, highlights as Obsidian’s extraction format ▸ 7:26, and a vocabulary section quietly joins the roadmap, sourced from an actual user’s actual pipeline rather than anyone’s imagination…