ProofMark Studio
One home for ~50 small document tools — clean hidden characters out of text, merge and split PDFs, OCR a scan. It is really three separate apps wired together by URL so each can be fixed and shipped on its own.
~50 tools (27 live) · ~210 tests · per-tool kill switch (≤60s, no redeploy)
I kept rebuilding the same one-off text and PDF fixers; folding them into one catalog meant building each cleanup once and reusing it.
- 01The honesty pass
- Broke
- The hub was showing a fake activity feed, a “throughput” stat hardcoded to a made-up number, and planned features drawn as if they were already live.
- Why
- Early scaffolding filler shipped as though it were real, which is exactly the kind of thing this site should never do.
- Fix
- Stripped all of it, replaced it with an honest map of what actually works, and added a test that blocks unshipped features from being described as done.
- 02The build that needed Cairo
- Broke
- Deploys started failing because a PDF-conversion library needed system graphics libraries the build runner did not have.
- Why
- A PDF library (xhtml2pdf) pulled in native Cairo graphics libraries Vercel’s build runner does not have.
- Fix
- Dropped the dependency (the two tools it powered degrade gracefully to “beta”) — and learned the hard way that Vercel installs from pyproject.toml, not requirements.txt, so it had to come out of both.
~50tool catalog
~210tests
Evidence before confidence.