I had a conversation last week with a close friend regarding the complexity of GitHub, my conversational contribution was that GitHub looks simple until it decides it would like to teach you something, and that you can glide along with clone and commit and push for weeks and feel very clever, but there is a reason people list Git as if it were a language and why real fluency is treated like a craft, because in the quiet hours when no one is watching it will hand you a moment that asks whether you actually understand what you are doing, and tonight was very much one of those moments.
The work I wanted to do could not have been more ordinary, the kind of housekeeping that makes a site kinder on a small screen, darker card backgrounds for contrast, a stray button that required anchorage, clearer outlines on links so a reader knows where they are headed, small steady nudges rather than sweeping redesigns, and because most people will meet my work through their phones I needed to see these changes on a real device rather than trusting a desktop preview, which meant I had to publish to GitHub Pages and let the network tell me the truth.
I slipped into routine with PowerShell, I reused a sequence that had worked before and I did not think carefully about every flag because I was focused on the quick feedback loop of build, check and tweak. Hidden in that sequence was the MIR option in robocopy which mirrors the source to the destination by deleting anything not present, a feature that is useful when used with care and merciless when used without it, and because I used it without care I created the perfect conditions for a small disaster.
The terminal stayed calm and the commands returned without protest, which I took as a good omen, then I opened the site on my phone and found myself looking at a version that belonged to a much earlier month, an artifact from August by my guess, and in that instant the air changed, my assumptions fell through the floor, and the first clear thought was an old one, what did I just do, followed closely by a less noble one, please do not let this be as bad as it looks.
I tried the sequence again because denial is a dependable stage of every problem, and when that did not help I did what I should have done at the start, I began to investigate in a methodical way, I checked the recent activity on the repository, I looked for any spare clones or worktrees that might still hold the world I had just misplaced, I searched for local file history on Windows, I opened the recycle bin with a sense of hope that I would not recommend as a life strategy, and while this was happening I also opened VS Code and stared at directories that were clean in the wrong way, the straws I was attempting to clutch to were breaking quicker than I could grasp at. In that moment I felt akin to Roman Roy when he witnessed his rocket launch explode in the solace of a bathroom in season 2 of the show �Sucession�, however unlike Roman I did not have the backing of a billion dollar empire to claw my way out of this mess.
For about an hour I did not have a website in front of me, I still had the backend, which is in many ways the core of the whole project, but without the site there is nothing to see and nothing to touch, the models become a story I tell rather than a thing a reader can experience, and that absence was the part that bit, because it pressed on a simple truth that is easy to ignore when you are making progress, that the work is only useful if it can be shown, and if I lose the place where it is shown then it might as well not exist for anyone else.
Eventually I was able to locate a relatively recent version of the files, and once these correct files resurfaced the rest became what it always becomes, a sequence of technical steps that are not complicated when approached with a clear head. I built a clean worktree that pointed only at the branch for Pages so the branch state could not be confused by the rest of the repository, I copied the dist output to the root of that worktree rather than to some throwaway folder that would never be seen by the live site, I ensured the CNAME file existed so the custom domain did not vanish as if the site had packed up and left town, I placed a nojekyll file so that nothing clever would mangle my static assets, and finally I pushed with intent rather than habit. I even checked the hash of my local index against the body fetched from the live domain and when the hashes matched the worry finally drained away and regular time resumed.
But that tidy recovery is not the story, because the lesson from tonight does not live in the branch strategy or the guard files or the hash checks, those are good habits and I will keep them, yet the thing I will remember is the stretch of time when the work seemed to have slipped out of reach, because in that hour I stared into the very ordinary fear that I had lost something I had poured hundreds of hours into, and the thought that followed was of despair and self pity. The simple practice of keeping a backup is not a vague idea or a plan for tomorrow but a routine you observe even when you are on a roll and the code is flowing, even more so then.
I try to keep copies of all work I do and I am not irresponsible by nature, but like most people I let backups drift when the pace is high, and in this project a week is not a small unit of time, a week contains many changes and some of them are structural and some of them are subtle but all of them represent hours that will not come back. If a backup is missed then the gap between what exists and what is saved becomes a canyon, tonight I got lucky, the crisis ended as a lesson rather than as a loss, and I would prefer not to rely on luck again, so I will put a simple ritual in place, regular snapshots on a schedule that does not care about mood, and a second location that is not the same disk praying for mercy.
The whole episode also pressed on an older memory from early in the project, a night in July when I was first trying to bring an early version of our now live pipeline to life, long before thoughts of PID governors and showcase websites. I managed to delete the main file that stitched everything together through the power of my own PowerShell naivety and I spent the night rebuilding from fragments until morning arrived and my parents were starting their day while I was still at the desk with that floaty feeling you get when the sun is up and sleep has been postponed by force. The file I made before breakfast was not pretty but it was the beginning of something better than what I had lost, at times the only enthusiasm was derived from the belief that this was a chance to redesign an optimal version of the original file.
Those summer months were intense in a way that only makes sense after you come out the other side, I was living at home with my family and my project days were split between hyper-focused micro problems that demanded patience and ensuring I still had a consistent macro view of the project and its direction. Most days I worked between eight to twelve hours depending on the current plan and the problems I encountered. When the mind started to fray I would take short breaks to Donegal where there was no signal and therefore laptop stayed behind. Donegal has a different rhythm, anyone who has visited can attest to this fact, from long walks on quiet roads, the cold Atlantic that brings peace to any brave swimmers, cliffs that ask you to trust both your feet and your nerve, small kayaks on still water, and most importantly the people around you who turn this place from an isolationists dream to a calm and social mental recharge. After a few days of that I would come back with a steadier sense of why I cared about this work.
My parents were understandably concerned because obsession looks odd from the outside and I was not always a convincing narrator of my own process, I kept attempting to assure them that the hours were not just hours, that they were building a set of skills and a shape of mind that a university course or a rigid internship cannot quite give you. A full stack personal project is very democratic in the chaos it offers, you get real meetings with real consequences, like a mobile layout that makes or breaks a first impression, or a model page that refuses to behave on a narrow screen, or a publication plan that needs to exist before the data is ready to be seen, and when those meetings go badly you cannot escalate to another team, you are the other team.
There have been quieter crossroads too, moments when I wondered whether it would be wiser to split everything into neat miniature projects that could be presented like little jewels like the way peers and other students before me had done. Each time I considered that path I returned to the same point, that the real challenge and the real learning sit in the seams, in the way the parts meet, in the continuity between a data pipeline and a web interface and the habits that keep both honest, and yes the macro view can drift if you do not hold it firmly and yes the continuity frays if you look away, but there is something valuable in choosing to hold all of it for a while, because it gives you problems that only exist because you wanted to build something whole, and those problems are a teacher with a very clear voice.
The life around the work matters as well, I am in the final pass of making the site publish ready, the sort of readiness where you are willing to put it in front of people who do not know you and let it stand on its own feet, a daunting task for many but especially for myself considering this is my flagship project. I stepped away from backend tasks a couple of weeks ago to focus on this push, I am behind my early schedule since the graduate hiring season is already moving and my plan had been to be public before it began. I had a university exam last week and I came out with a mark that gave me the peace of mind to continue with my current distribution of working hours, I have a university project running that demands attention and I try to keep up with friends when I can, all of which is to say that the work exists inside a life rather than in a vacuum, and the decisions I make about safety nets and discipline do not only protect files, they protect time and sanity and relationships.
So the lesson I am taking from tonight is straightforward and it is not romantic, it is that fear is a poor project manager but a very effective messenger, for an hour I believed that I had erased the place where my work touches the world, and that hour was enough to make the case for a different kind of discipline, one that does not depend on heroic recovery or lucky forensics, one that writes its own insurance with regular backups and simple checks, one that makes room for momentum without trusting momentum to keep anything safe, and if I can keep that discipline then the next time a command promises to mirror a directory it will be ran with a degree of confidence that no matter the outcome the safety of the project is not in question.
I am grateful that the outcome tonight is a story and not a loss, I am grateful that I can laugh at the moment I refreshed the site and found an ancient version staring back at me like a museum exhibit, and I am reminded that the project is not just code and charts and pages, it is also the set of habits that keep those things alive, and if I can get those habits right then I can spend more time building the things I want to show and less time walking through empty directories and humming sad songs to myself, which will be better for everyone including my future self who has earned at least a little bit of peace.