A Power Outage, a Cloudflare Rabbit Hole, and a New Matrix View
A new Setup/Operate split for SRT Matrix with a real drag-and-drop thumbnail view, a generator that ran out of gas mid-session — twice — and a genuinely satisfying rabbit hole tracking down why releases were quietly failing to publish across five different projects.
Since the last post it's been almost entirely SRT Matrix and the infrastructure underneath it — the kind of week where the actual shipped feature is maybe a third of the story, and the rest is chasing down why something that used to just work suddenly didn't.
Setup and Operate, with real thumbnails
SRT Matrix's dashboard used to be one screen doing two jobs at once: setting things up and actually running live feeds, all crammed into the same text-heavy cards. I split it into two views. Setup is just for configuration. Operate is the one I'm actually happy with — every feed shows up as a tile with a live preview picture, bordered in red, yellow, or green depending on whether it's offline, on standby, or actually live. You still drag feeds around to route them, just onto something that looks like what it's actually doing instead of a name in a box.
The generator ran out of gas. Twice.
Partway through building all that, the power went out — the generator ran dry and everything dropped mid-session. Got it refueled, picked back up, and a little while later it happened again. Nothing lost, just a couple of interruptions that turned "quick feature work" into a longer stretch than planned.
Why were releases quietly failing?
The feature itself shipped clean, but publishing the actual release turned into its own investigation. The upload kept dying partway through, and our self-hosted GitLab server looked perfectly healthy the whole time — low load, nothing stuck, fast responses. Turned out the problem was the public path into GitLab: fine for small requests, but it would stall and corrupt anything bigger than a few megabytes going in, which is exactly what a release upload is.
I fixed it by setting up a locked-down account on the GitLab server that can only forward traffic straight to the local web server — no other access at all — and routing release uploads through that instead of the public path. Along the way I found a second, unrelated bug: a private key I'd stored for one of the build jobs had quietly lost its last line break somewhere between being generated and being saved, and a security update on the build server had just started refusing to accept it. It had apparently been fine for a long time, right up until it wasn't. Once both were sorted, I rolled the same fix out to every project that publishes releases the same way — five of them — so it's just how releases work here now.
What's next
With that detour closed out, I'm back on SRT Matrix's actual roadmap. Next up is a real diagnostics view: connection quality numbers (round-trip time, lost data, retransmits) for every connection, not just a connected/disconnected dot. Design's done, plan's written, build starts next.