Documenting a project honestly means admitting where it actually is, not where the README wishes it were. So here's the real state of things, project by project.
Rollbook: further along than it admits
Rollbook's own README is behind its code in an unusual direction — it undersells the app. It still describes a purely offline, no-account tool and lists the QR scanner as a future idea. Both are wrong now: the scanner is built and working, and there's real Supabase auth with cloud sync, public roll pages, and per-user isolation shipped alongside the local-first mode. The envelope print format is a fourth label the docs never mention.
What's genuinely still open there: an IndexedDB storage driver (the interface exists, the implementation doesn't), EXIF and sidecar export, per-frame notes, bulk label sheets, and encrypted file sync. There's a forward-compatibility bucket baked into the data model so older exports survive new features, and a "public archive" visibility tier that's reserved but deliberately switched off — the whole app is still noindex until that archive is ready.
A stale README that undersells the work is its own kind of bug. Half of documenting is just catching the docs up to what already shipped.
Phototools: five tools, one on probation
Four of the five calculators are solid and tested. The fifth — Middle Focal Length — ships and is live in the tool list, but its own working notes flag it "in progress, may have mistakes." It's real, it's usable, and it is not yet something I'd stake a shot on blindly. I'd rather say that than pretend otherwise.
The roadmap there is two tools I want next: a star-trail and astrophotography calculator, and a golden-and-blue-hour timeline. Neither is built yet. What's shipped is genuinely client-side with no backend — and, to correct a thing it would be easy to assume, there's no offline PWA layer yet, just ordinary static caching.
The sites: honest about the seams
The gallery is live-configured but still a prototype — its photos are placeholders, and it says so in a banner rather than hiding it. The shared design tokens across every site are copied by hand, not pulled from one package; keeping them in sync is a discipline, not a mechanism, and turning that into a real single source of truth is a someday job.
Why write this down
The tidy version of a portfolio pretends everything is finished. But the interesting part of building your own tools is the seam between what works and what doesn't yet — and a blog that documents the work should show that seam. This is the honest snapshot for July 2026. The next one will be different, which is the whole point.