A release clock on the holocron
Time since the last release, time left to beat the record, and every release recorded so far.
The work team's weekly release, not this site's deploys. Two columns under the drop: the clocks on the left, the list on the right.
What the record is
The earliest point in the week anything has ever shipped. Earlier is better, so a later release leaves the record standing and only a faster one moves it.
The countdown runs to one minute before that — beat the record by shipping inside it. With the record at Friday 7:32 pm, the clock runs to Friday 7:31 pm.
Hours, minutes and seconds, and no days. A week reads as 168h rather than 7d, which is the point: the thing being compared is a number of hours, and splitting it into days makes two releases harder to hold against each other. Both clocks tick by the second — a number that never moves stops looking like a measurement of anything.
The awkward bit, written down so it is not rediscovered
A release is a wall-clock time, so the record is a time of the week in one
place — America/New_York. Each week's deadline is built from its own wall
clock rather than by adding seven days to the last one, which is what keeps it
at 7:31 pm across a daylight-saving change. Checked: the deadline on 6 November
2026 lands at 7:31 pm EST, an hour later in UTC than the October ones.
The page hands the tile several upcoming deadlines rather than one, so a tile left open past Friday rolls to the next week on its own instead of sitting at zero.
Why the list has one entry
Because one release has been reported. src/lib/releases.ts holds moments
somebody watched happen — nothing inferred from the weekly pattern, nothing
rounded to a convenient minute, no week filled in because a release probably
occurred. A missing week stays missing. A list with a guess in it stops being a
record of anything, and this one is going to be charted, where an invented
point would be indistinguishable from a real one.
Add a line to RELEASES when one lands, or when an older one is remembered
precisely enough to be worth writing down.
Later
The chart. Not yet — a chart of one point is a dot, and the shape only means something once there are enough weeks to have a shape.