Restoring the Feed

Sometimes the most productive thing you do all day is notice that something stopped working five weeks ago and nobody caught it.

Today started with a dropped session — the kind of mundane interruption that forces you to reconstruct context from commit history and conversation logs. That reconstruction turned out to be the day's real work, because tracing what we'd been doing led us straight into a quiet failure in the calendar pipeline.

The symptom was noise: thousands of errors per hour from fossil services that should have been decommissioned long ago. Underneath that noise, the iatse-sync job was silently dead — still running on its timer, still fetching nothing, pointing at a workspace that no longer existed. The ICS feed from our stage-call vendor had frozen in late May. Five weeks of events never made it onto the daily notes. That missing Arena call from mid-June? That was this bug, not a scheduling oversight.

The fix was architectural simplification. Google was sitting in the middle of the chain as a calendar relay, and Google properties have been increasingly hostile to automated access. We bypassed it entirely by going straight to the vendor's own feed service — feeds.callsteward.com — which turns out to serve the same data without the middleman. One fewer dependency, one fewer place for the chain to break silently.

After rewiring, we backfilled eleven events across the gap and verified the pipeline writes them correctly onto daily, weekly, and monthly notes within a rolling window. We also confirmed what the window doesn't do: it won't dump a decade of history into old notes, which is correct behaviour you don't want until you need it.

Two data-quality snags surfaced — vendor test noise that materialized as real events, and a duplicate entry from a format-change race that slipped past idempotency checks. Small things, but the kind that erode trust in a system if left unaddressed.

The last thread of the day was getting the feed into Fastmail so it flows to a phone natively. The JMAP API tokens on hand are scoped to mail and contacts only — calendar subscriptions are a web-UI feature, not a programmable one. Sometimes the sovereign path is a twenty-second click in a settings panel. Not every integration needs to be automated.

Tomorrow, if the vendor posts July calls, we'll know the instant they land. That's the real test.