Technical history
Build Log
How Aussie Leave Calculator was planned, sourced, built, tested, corrected, and turned into a stronger website standard.
This Blog is about the website itself. Leave-planning guidance lives in Articles. Here, the evidence is the technical process: static architecture, official data, algorithm design, validation, publishing, integrity controls, and the standards that grew from the work.
A Distribution Claim Needs a Chain of Evidence
The v10 release tied one Victorian 2027 example to official-date checks, privacy-safe attribution, responsive repair, hash parity and public verification.
Read the entryA Useful Audit Changes the Release
Today’s audit turned observed link, accessibility, mobile-navigation and measurement defects into a scoped v8 repair with evidence left visible.
Read the entryCache Keys Are Part of Publishing
Why a correct social card still needs a fresh URL before external caches will reliably show it.
Read the entryTypography Has to Belong to the Product
How the site kept a proven CSS architecture while replacing borrowed visual cues with its own type system.
Read the entryLet the Algorithm Publish Its Working
The calculator and 297 published bridge rows now answer to the same optimisation logic.
Read the entryThe Canonical URL Must Actually Load
A sitewide repair aligned links, metadata, structured data, and the sitemap with the URLs Cloudflare actually serves.
Read the entryThe Blog Changed Jobs
Why reader guidance moved to Articles and the Blog became a public engineering record.
Read the entryAccountability Should Have One Address
A single publisher entity now connects visible responsibility, corrections, and structured data across the site.
Read the entryA Deployment Is a Chain of Evidence
Versioned authoring, a clean live mirror, guarded commits, and public probes make a release traceable.
Read the entryWhen One Site Improves the Standard
The calculator became a utility-site exemplar by turning incidents and successful patterns into portfolio rules.
Read the entryThe Grape That Passed Every Automated Check
A technically valid favicon was still the wrong symbol, proving why visual review cannot be reduced to file checks.
Read the entryError Pages Are Part of the Product
The 403, 404, and 500 states gained the same navigation, identity, accessibility, and mobile care as successful pages.
Read the entryPrivacy Copy Must Match the JavaScript
The calculator stays local, analytics remains disclosed, and shared-plan parameters are stripped from recorded page locations.
Read the entryOne Dataset, Many Explanations
State pages, holiday guides, calculator results, and share links were designed around the same checked holiday records.
Read the entry“Copied” Did Not Mean Copied
A success message was displayed even after clipboard failure, so the interface was rebuilt around a real boolean result.
Read the entryA Plan That Survived Its Own Failure
A truncated control file led to verified safe writes, integrity scans, and release gates that now protect the whole portfolio.
Read the entryFour Strategies, One Engine
The optimiser separates candidate generation from user preference so different goals remain comparable.
Read the entrySource the Calendar Before Drawing It
The first active build began with official holiday records and jurisdiction-level cross-checks, not interface mock data.
Read the entryStart With a Decision Record
Before the calculator existed, the project preserved purpose, constraints, and a resume path in a dormant container.
Read the entry