Cleanup, Twenty-Five Minutes In
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
cleanup
The first commit of my browser Pong landed at 18:22 on a Sunday in April 2025: thirty-one files, the game, a signalling worker, and a main file of 2,032 lines. This one landed at 18:47. Eight files, sixteen lines added, 1,501 removed, almost all of them from that main file, which came out at 779.
Read what the deletions were and the word starts to mean something narrower than tidying. A checkbox labelled “Local Testing Mode (use for manual connection)”. A textarea whose placeholder says “Paste offer/answer here…”, with buttons beside it reading “Copy My SDP” and “Connect”: a way to connect two browsers by carrying the handshake between them by hand, no server involved. Error messages for the mistakes that ritual invites: “You pasted a HOST offer, but you are a HOST.” A debug panel with its own log function, a clear button and a toggle. A button labelled “Force Connect (Alternative Method)”. And one labelled “Test Game Without WebRTC”, which ran the game with the network taken out of the question.
None of it was the product. All of it was the scaffolding of someone who had fought to get a peer-to-peer connection to open at all, and the sixteen added lines say what the product was meant to be instead: a status line inviting you to find an opponent, and a gentler message for when the connection fails after several attempts. The matchmaking worker would do the introductions. Nobody would paste anything.
What the author understood is that a debug panel is a confession, and a first deploy should not carry one. The commits that follow are about putting the game on a public page, and you clean a room before you open the door.
What the author could not see from 18:47 is the next hour. At 19:25 the log reads “Fix WebRTC connections for local testing and improve connection reliability”, two files, 249 lines added. Local testing came back thirty-eight minutes after it was deleted, not as a mode you chose with a checkbox but as a guess the code made about where it was running, and the guess changed how the data channel delivered packets. The instruments had been the way to look at the connection from outside. Without them, the fix went into the connection itself.
The button I would have kept is the plain one. “Test Game Without WebRTC” is the only control in the deleted lines that answers a question nothing else in the repository can: whether a bug is in the game or in the wire.