The boss fight got fought.

The sweep finished. The flip-book catalog — the surface we expected to be the hardest, which is why it went last — now reflows properly on phones, with real touch and swipe handling, and the sweep earned its keep one more time by catching a dead “Previous” button nobody had reported. The parts-diagram pop-ups learned to cap themselves to the screen. Brand pages got the honest version of responsive — rebuilt on class-based CSS instead of patching inline styles. The site header collapsed to one clean row on phones, and the customer account area traded its dark subnav strip for a proper menu. Then the part that outlasts the fixes: the standards file was updated twice to codify what the sweep taught — the CSS-transform trap that caged a slide-over panel, the stacked-table patterns, pop-up sizing rules, the attributes an add-to-cart button must carry. Fixes decay; rules compound. And the final pass moved from one developer’s hands to everyone’s pockets: the real-device check is being crowdsourced to the whole team’s actual phones.

Second: archaeology, this time in the analytics. We wired up a direct connection to the legacy site’s analytics property and dug. Finding one: the data only reaches back to mid-2023 — everything from the prior analytics era is permanently gone, which is a quiet warning to anyone who hasn’t checked what their own property actually retains. Finding two: in its entire life, the legacy site never captured a single e-commerce event — years of orders, invisible to its own analytics. Finding three: since last fall, raw traffic has been dominated by bots with a recognizable signature — the same crowd that ran up the search bill two recaps ago — laid over a flat, genuine human baseline.

And the finding that matters most for this week’s own headline: only about a fifth of the legacy site’s human sessions come from phones and tablets — and returning customers, our regulars, are roughly ninety percent desktop. The tempting read is “mobile doesn’t matter to our buyers, why did we just spend two weeks on it?” The honest read is that the data can’t say that: a site that has been hostile to phones for years doesn’t measure mobile demand, it suppresses it — our desktop-heavy regulars may simply be customers the old site trained. You can’t distinguish “they don’t want it” from “we never let them have it” in this dataset, so the mobile case rests where it belongs: on behavior — parts get looked up standing at the machine, not sitting at a desk — and not on a revenue claim the numbers can’t support.

Third, an arc closed through the two-developer pipeline. September’s recap told the geography decision — don’t bulk-import the legacy system’s frozen, outdated subdivision lists into a customer-facing checkout; map to current geography and keep the legacy codes for round-tripping. This week the colleague who owns the sync delivered the module that implements it: an ISO country-and-state import wizard, plus upgrades to two of her other modules. The pipeline did what it does — parallel code reviews, one blocker and a handful of fixes caught and applied, nineteen stray files swept out of the delivery, promotion to staging, every verification test passed — and the whole exchange closed with an itemized note explaining each change made to her work and why. Decided in September, built in October, reviewed and landed. The collaboration keeps maturing in public.

One closer from the gates department: the deploy wrapper scripts — freshness checks and all — were extended from staging to every environment this week. On their very first real run on a new instance, the gate refused: the server’s code was stale, exactly the condition the gate exists to catch, and it declined to proceed until the code was updated. New environments, old scars, working on contact.

A two-week sweep closed, a dataset read honestly instead of conveniently, and a September decision shipped by a second pair of hands. The arcs are getting shorter — which is what a migration looks like when it’s getting close.

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