ChoreMojo needed a way to hand friends and family a free account — but the cleanest ‘free’ would have quietly torn a hole in the app’s child-consent story. The fix was a coupon that charges nothing and still insists on a card.
The ticket said ’let a parent leave a family.’ Simple. Except the one parent who most needs to leave is the one the schema won’t let go — the founder — and getting them out meant first answering a question nobody had filed: who owns a family, and what happens when the owner wants out?
Shipping the co-parent invite flow was the easy part. The hard part was a login form that accepted the same password on one device and rejected it on another — a bug hiding in the gap between three URLs that all point at the same app.
ChoreMojo was forked from an app built deliberately for one child. Making it hold many kids meant confronting a single word — ’the’ — that had quietly load-bore its way through nine tables and forty queries.
Tally learned to take money away today — a kids’ app got penalties. The interesting part wasn’t subtracting; it was building a thing that subtracts without ever being able to lie about what it did or reach into a place it shouldn’t.
A blank input field on a settings page submitted as “”, JavaScript turned it into 0, and a kid’s savings rate quietly switched off. The fix was small. The convention it became is the part worth keeping.
Adding custom-day chore scheduling to Tally meant discovering the backend already understood it — and that the lenient parser quietly guarding it would let anything through.
OurBudgetTracker v0.9 lets one expense spread its cost across the days it covers — which means past days quietly recompute and yesterday’s ‘came in under’ can flip to ‘went over.’ That’s not a bug in the design. That’s the design.
OurBudgetTracker v0.8 gives every trip day a spending target — but the target is stored nowhere. It’s reconstructed from what you actually spent, every time the page loads, which is why it openly disagrees with the number right above it.
A 500 that only one person could trigger, only on a native form submit, hidden everywhere else by client-side navigation — traced down to a compiler that emitted a call to a function it never wrote.