Three days ago, I reverted a direct DOM swipe optimization because the action was writing transforms to the wrong element. The fix was simple: walk up to the view layer with closest(), and own the entire gesture lifecycle without touching Svelte's reactive graph. The result dropped swipe-back from ~8ms/frame to under 1ms.

Replaced instant flick navigation with a peek gesture that reveals the next or previous stream sliding in as you drag. A 20% threshold commits the transition; anything less snaps back. The tricky part was coordinating the animation commit with an event-driven navigation system that assumes it owns visibility.

Safari iOS refused to play certain HLS streams because the downloader was building playlists with rounded durations and missing discontinuity tags. The accurate data existed — ffprobe already computed it — but the interface threw it away. Fixing the return type fixed the spec compliance.

A performance refactoring broke swipe gestures and exposed four more bugs in gallery-reader. Every one traced back to the same root cause: unclear ownership of state that crosses session boundaries. Applying Rust-like ownership thinking — single owner, explicit borrowers — fixed all five.

When swiping back from the reader to manga details, the chapter list showed a stale scroll position. The fix captures where the user clicked, then invisibly scrolls the hidden manga view as chapters advance — so the current chapter is already in place when they swipe back.

Chained swipe-back gestures (reader→manga→list) hit a black screen because navigation used a single previousViewMode slot. Favorites couldn't be swiped back to because it wasn't a real view. Replacing the single slot with a view stack fixed both problems.

Replaced a click-based quadrant overlay with swipe gestures in a userscript that hijacks the page's event system. Touch events had to bypass our own addEventListener block using the saved original reference, and the iOS-native edge-back swipe needed to reveal a hidden list view mid-gesture.

The manga reader's infinite scroll stopped loading after navigating list -> manga -> reader -> list. The IntersectionObserver was still connected but never fired again. iOS WebKit permanently breaks observers whose root element goes through CSS visibility changes. The fix: a generation counter that forces recreation on view re-entry, plus a health check for edge cases where even a fresh observer misses.

Merging two repos into one, pulling all Hitomi-specific constants and logic into a shared gallery-sources package

Swiping between streams navigated correctly but showed a black screen. The video element thought it was loaded, but HLS was dead. A skip optimization trusted a DOM marker without verifying the stream was actually alive.

Clicking a gallery to read it showed nothing for minutes. Sprite thumbnail polls held all 6 HTTP/1.1 connections hostage. The reactive abort ran too late because Svelte 5 effects are asynchronous. A synchronous centralized abort in openReader() fixed it instantly.

The progressive UX only worked on first open. On second open, cached liveUrls loaded all at once. The fix: check IDB inline per-streamer, consume leftover entries after the endpoint list, and make every open look the same.

77 tracked artists, zero manual checking — building a daily sync pipeline for hitomi.la

From a 632-line index.html to a data-driven SvelteKit SPA with PWA installability and auto-deploy

Debugging a 4-month-old wireless backup failure and automating HEIC photo extraction

Fixing stale account balance after iOS resume and a missing chart bar at minute boundaries

Building a resilient live stream list — caching liveUrls, fixing black screens, replacing a timer with a processing queue, and learning that organic signals beat proactive checks