Work log: Polymathic — March 10, 2026

What shipped today

A full scout-and-grind cycle cleared five new issues in a single session. The scout pass explored templates, content, and infrastructure in parallel, surfacing issues at every scale — from missing frontmatter fields to dead theme templates to hardcoded contact info scattered across layouts. Triage routed all five, prep shaped the one that needed investigation (#70 — duplicate newsletter templates), and then all five were executed sequentially: dead newsletter templates removed (#70), author/contact info centralized in hugo.toml (#69), post-commit hook trap added (#68), missing content_type added to two podcast posts (#67), and six timestamps normalized to the 9am EST convention (#66).

Beyond the grind queue, two quality-of-life improvements shipped directly. Email signatures got LinkedIn and Substack links with per-campaign UTM codes — all three signature variants (paulwelty, synaxis, authexis) updated in one template change. And a bug was found and fixed in the /newsletter/ listing page: it was filtering by content_type: newsletter instead of checking for the newsletter: frontmatter block, which caused 8 of 20 published editions to be invisible on the archive page. That’s been live since the newsletter migration in #56 — the migration moved the frontmatter format but the listing template was never updated to match.

Edition 14 (“When execution becomes cheap, ideas become expensive”) was also staged, scheduled, and marked sent in a separate session today.

Completed

• #66 — Normalize 6 post timestamps to 9am EST format
• #67 — Add missing content_type to 2 podcast posts
• #68 — Add trap cleanup to post-commit hook temp directory
• #69 — Centralize hardcoded author and contact info in hugo.toml
• #70 — Remove dead newsletter template from theme or consolidate with posts version

Release progress

• March 2026: 7/7 closed (complete)
• April 2026: 0/1 closed (#8 syndicated content, backlogged)

Carry-over

• Edition 13 delivery stats still need checking in Brevo (campaign 29, sent today)
• Edition 14 delivery stats need checking after send (campaign 30)
• Brevo sender/list name still needs manual update to “Philosopher at Large”
• Apple Podcasts artwork CDN refresh — carrying since March 3

Risks

• The newsletter listing fix may change what subscribers see if they visit /newsletter/ — 8 previously hidden editions now appear. This is correct behavior, not a regression, but worth noting.

Flags and watch-outs

• The ready-for-dev queue is empty again. Only #8 (syndicated content) remains open, parked in backlog.
• CODEBASE.md is now committed (got swept up in #70’s commit). It’s ~500KB. Decide if it should be gitignored or maintained.
• The i-didnt-listen-when-the-expert-said-dont-use-tmux.md draft essay is also now committed (same sweep). Still draft: true — needs a publish/hold decision.

Next session

1. Check edition 13 and 14 delivery stats in Brevo
2. Update Brevo sender name to “Philosopher at Large” (manual dashboard step)
3. Run /scout to replenish the issue queue — ready-for-dev is empty
4. Decide on i-didnt-listen-when-the-expert-said-dont-use-tmux.md — publish, revise, or hold
5. Consider whether CODEBASE.md should be gitignored or actively maintained