Old URLs finally match the live tree, a handful of screens that fell over the moment you clicked them, youth and Features behaving like a club, and stars that rank against your own league.

Goose takes the schema, the Nest tree comes out of the repository, and seeding runs as Go — retracting the hedge I wrote ten days earlier.

Photographing the Nest API before copying it, cutting over one domain at a time, and finally turning off /v1 — with Nest keeping the schema and the seeds. For now.

Attributes stop being remapped for display, current ability counts the skills outside a player's role, and listed positions become a familiarity score you train, decay, and pay for on Saturday.

Who a player is, where a body stands in this shape, and what a manager reads on the pitch — three different questions that had been sharing one answer.

A name generator that didn't survive the move to Go, badges my one tester called generic, onboarding tours worth replaying, and fixtures that aren't a mirror after Christmas.

A power cut, a balcony, and a week spent giving players the agency to say no — plus richer inbox messages and every meeting two clubs have ever had.

Why I'm keeping a diary of building The Dugout, what goes in it, and what stays out.

Eleven weeks of staging, a league season nearly over, and nobody being told they'd won it or gone down — plus grids that finally behave the same everywhere.

Birth potential becomes a hard ceiling, growth rewards the training ground you actually built, and weekly youth intake samples the division you actually play in.

Youth academy intake, U21 league and cup, eligibility and registration — plus the last of the duplicate tick paths leaving Nest for good.

Club-house and route bootstraps with stale-while-revalidate, a verified dead-code pass, and some quiet tightening I'm not going to describe in detail.

With Go running the tick on staging, Nest loses its processors and cron producers for good — it answers HTTP and enqueues, and that's the whole job now.

A reconciler takes over cup and playoff progression, restart safety gets teeth, the bracket stops stacking cards on itself, and the Go workers show up on a dashboard.

A Go worker and scheduler speaking Nest's job shapes, gated by queue ownership — plus the claims, dedupe keys, and ledgers that make a restart boring.

A narrative queue for briefings, articles, and press copy with procedural fallback — then giving up on running a model in my own cluster and moving to a hosted one.

Per-country Sunday knockout cups — progressive draws, cup-tied lineups, prize money, discipline, and a full Cup section in the game beside the league.

Prerendered marketing site — homepage, blog, legal pages — deployed to Cloudflare Pages on a staging project, while the apex domain stayed deliberately unpointed.

Matches simulate before kickoff, then every client reveals the stored timeline minute by minute — with a commentary registry that has its own RNG so flavour never touches the result.

News at global, national and division level with procedural match write-ups, plus press conferences as a modal so answering the media doesn't drag you out of the clubhouse.

An ordered daily tick that moves the world in a known sequence, match simulation kept on its own clock, and cross-tier playoffs after MD30 that don't poison the league table.

Listings, shortlists, offers with timers, windows and board fee limits — plus an economy the FA desk can tune without a redeploy. No loans yet, on purpose.

Building the admin console as a separate Angular app — seasons, clock controls, seeding, user lookup, queue visibility and maintenance mode, all with preview-before-apply.

Paying for a second identity rewrite in a young codebase, and putting the first Terraform-and-Actions path in place so the game could live somewhere that wasn't my laptop.

Six quiet months, then April 2026 lands match day, transfers, training, finances and the inbox in one world — and swaps Spartan for PrimeNG on the way in.

October 2025 was a handshake with the codebase after months away — bump the dependencies, delete the auth UI that had already died, and finally write down what was actually left to build.

One June commit generates team badges, and then the log goes quiet through July, August and September. There's no hidden epic in there. I just stopped.

May 2025 was nav, a squad list, player photos, fixtures and form — the month the browser started to matter and the empty panels started to nag.

The rest of April 2025 was me giving the engine somewhere to live — an API, a login, seasons, seeders, and a first Angular shell. Roughly two hundred commits, half of which I've since thrown away.

Git says this started on 16 April 2025. It actually started in 2024, with sketches, borrowed abstractions, and a crude simulator I ran until the scorelines stopped being funny.