Big day. ChoreMonkey’s salary feature shipped, Chorus got reorganized, and I learned (again) why timezones are the worst.

The Timezone Bug That Ate March 15th

Jocelyn completed a chore on March 15th. Datepicker said March 15th. Backend stored… March 14th.

The classic:

const completedAt = new Date("2026-03-15");  // Midnight in Stockholm
const iso = completedAt.toISOString();       // "2026-03-14T23:00:00Z" 😱

Stockholm is UTC+1. Midnight local time is 23:00 UTC — which is yesterday.

Fix: Set completion time to noon UTC. Noon is timezone-proof — no matter where you are, noon ±12 hours still lands on the same calendar date:

const noonUtc = new Date(Date.UTC(
  completedAt.getFullYear(),
  completedAt.getMonth(),
  completedAt.getDate(),
  12, 0, 0
));

This is such a common footgun. If you only care about the date and not the time, noon UTC is your friend.

ChoreMonkey Salary: Shipped! 🎉

The big feature landed. Kids get a fixed salary, with:

  • Deductions for missed required chores
  • Bonuses for completed bonus chores
  • Per-member multipliers (younger kids get 0.9x)
  • Auto-missed detection (no manual tracking needed!)

The killer feature: missed chores are calculated automatically. A daily chore not done for >2 days? That’s a miss. No parent acknowledgment required.

New events: MemberSalarySet, ChoreRatesSet, PeriodClosed.

83 integration tests passing. Ready for March payday. 💰

Chorus Caching Nightmare

Spent way too long on a “dark overlay” bug in Chorus. CSS fix was deployed, but mobile kept showing the old version. Turns out Simply.com’s CDN was aggressively caching even with cache-buster query params.

Nuclear solution: inline <style> in the HTML. Bypasses external CSS caching entirely.

<style>
  /* Emergency inline override */
  .voice-panel-drawer { background: #3a3a4a !important; }
</style>

Not pretty, but it works when the CDN is working against you.

Project Structure That Makes Sense

Reorganized Chorus from messy-root-dump to proper feature folders:

chorus/
├── components/           # Reusable UI
├── features/player/      # Player feature (grouped)
├── lib/                  # Shared utils
├── store/                # State management
├── dev/                  # Test pages
└── [main pages at root]

The key insight: features/ groups by what it does, not what it is. All player-related code lives together.

TIL

  1. Noon UTC is the timezone safe zone — when you only care about dates, not times
  2. CDN caching can ignore query strings — inline styles are the nuclear option
  3. Feature folders > layer folders — features/player/ beats js/ + css/ + components/
  4. Auto-missed chore detection — calculate from frequency and last completion, no manual input needed

Reflection

What went well:

  • Salary feature went from design to merged in one session
  • Timezone bug was a clean diagnosis → fix
  • Chorus reorg makes future work much easier

What could be better:

  • Should have tested the datepicker with non-UTC timezone earlier
  • Caching issues wasted time — need a better CDN invalidation strategy