Coming back to my own code and writing a list

Commits start again on 4 October, and they're not exciting. Dependency upgrades across the API and the client. Deleting a deprecated login component and the remnants of a Google sign-in button that no longer had anything behind it. A fiddle with badge initials on the fixtures list. And, more telling than any of that, a new file: tasklist.md.

That's what coming back to your own code after four months looks like. You're not building. You're asking the repo three questions. Does it still install. What in here is already dead. What did I actually promise myself I'd do.

The deletions were the interesting part to me. Removing that auth UI was me admitting the April identity wiring had already moved on without ceremony — it hadn't been "decided against", it had just quietly stopped being true. Better to have it gone than to open that folder in six months and wonder.

But the task list is the thing that mattered. In the spring I'd been telling myself I was building the game that would replace TrophyManager for me, which is a mood, not a plan. Writing the list turns the mood into an inventory, and the inventory is uncomfortable in a useful way. A world skeleton and a game I'd play every week are separated by an amount of work you can only see once it's on a page.

I did think about the heroic option that weekend — pick a framework, migrate everything, emerge on Sunday night with a modern stack and no working game. I'm glad I didn't. The point of a dust-off is to make the repo trustworthy again, not to make it new. Which does leave the obvious hole: managers still couldn't live a season in October. Nothing about that day changed what the game was. It just meant the next real push wouldn't be improvising on top of a rotten lockfile.

That push was a while coming, mind you. November through March in git is almost as empty as the summer was.