Three bugs we found and fixed in our own pipeline this week

Three bugs we found and fixed in our own pipeline this week

Journeymen grades developer work against GitHub’s server-side history. That only means something if the grading pipeline itself is reliable — so here’s the honest engineering update, not the highlight reel.

1. Silent progress loss on connect-repo analysis runs

A connect-repo analysis run could sit in processing status with no visibility into what stage it was actually at, or whether it had stalled. From a dev’s dashboard, a slow run and a stuck run looked identical. We added explicit progress-stage tracking so a stuck run is visibly stuck, not silently pending.

2. A background worker timing out without a clear signal

The Lambda-based worker handling asynchronous analysis jobs was hitting its timeout under certain repo sizes, and the failure mode wasn’t obvious from the outside — a run would just never complete. We root-caused the timeout and fixed the underlying slow path.

3. Dead-letter queue with no observability

Jobs that failed enough times to land in the SQS dead-letter queue were, until this week, invisible — no alerting, no in-product surfacing. We wired up observability so a DLQ arrival is now a visible signal instead of a silent dead end.

Why post about our own bugs

The entire pitch of Journeymen is “don’t trust the self-reported version, trust the verified one.” That standard has to apply to us too. All three issues: found, fixed, and shipped this week.

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