The Calendar That Went Blank on My Own Show

By Junaid Ahmed

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I opened the social calendar to check my scheduled posts.

It was empty.

I clicked Month. Empty. Week. Empty. Day. Empty.

I had posts scheduled. I knew I did. I'd just made them.

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Nothing, In Three Different Layouts

The frustrating kind of broken isn't an error message. An error message at least tells you something happened.

This was worse. The page loaded. The buttons worked. The calendar drew itself, politely, with nothing in it. Switching between month, week, and day just gave me three empty grids. No posts. No warning. No sign that anything was wrong.

If you didn't know better, you'd assume you had no posts scheduled and move on. Which is exactly what makes this kind of thing dangerous. It doesn't look like a bug. It looks like the truth.

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The Catalog Was the Problem

Here's the part that got me.

The calendar broke because my show has a lot of episodes.

Hacks and Hobbies is past seven hundred episodes. When the calendar went to load its posts, it first grabbed the ID of every single one of those episodes, then turned around and asked the database: give me the posts for episode 1, or episode 2, or episode 3, and so on, seven hundred times, in a single request.

That request got so long the server took one look and refused to answer it. Too big. Rejected at the door.

So the app got nothing back. And instead of saying "something went wrong," it quietly assumed the answer was zero and drew an empty calendar.

The thing I'm proudest of, a back catalog built over years, was the exact thing breaking the feature. A small show would never have hit it. Mine hit it every time.

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The Fix

The fix is less dramatic than the bug.

Instead of listing out every episode by name, the calendar now just asks the database the simpler question directly: give me the posts for this show. One short request. No giant list. It doesn't matter if you have ten episodes or ten thousand, the question stays the same size.

I checked it against my own account. Seven posts, right where they should be, the two waiting to go out, and the five that had failed and needed my attention. All of them back on the calendar.

I also left a test behind that fails the moment anyone tries to bring the old way back. This bug doesn't get to happen twice.

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Why This One Stung

I've spent a lot of my life telling people that the long haul is the point. Keep showing up. Keep publishing. The back catalog is the asset.

And then my own product punished the people who did exactly that.

The podcasters most likely to see a blank calendar were the ones who'd been at it the longest, the ones with hundreds of episodes and the most to schedule. The loyal ones. The bug found them first.

That's the part I can't shrug off. A tool for podcasters that quietly falls over on the podcasters who've done the most work has its priorities backwards.

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What's Next

The calendar holds up under a big catalog now, and it'll tell the truth if a load ever fails instead of pretending you have nothing planned.

PodGlue is supposed to reward the long haul, not buckle under it. The whole point is that the work you've already done keeps paying off. A calendar that goes blank the moment your catalog gets serious isn't that.

Now it isn't blank. It's just your posts, where you left them.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks and Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue.