Devlog 004: This session was mostly infrastructure and debugging rather than new features, but it cleared several blockers that had been compounding across sessions.
The backend crash loop got permanently fixed. The root cause was _exit_if_orphaned in the Python process firing on every Rust hot-reload during npm run tauri dev. When Cargo rebuilds the Tauri binary, the parent PID relationship changes momentarily, which was triggering the orphan detection and killing Python deliberately with exit code 0. The monitor thread interpreted that as a clean exit and did not restart it. The fix was disabling orphan detection entirely in dev mode via the CANVAS_HUB_DEV environment variable, and switching the production check from getppid() == 1 to os.kill(parent_pid, 0) for a more robust existence check. The Rust monitor thread also got crash logging via dirs::home_dir() so it is no longer dependent on the Tauri AppHandle being available from a background thread.
Tile resizing and photo row contagion were also fixed this session, and the actual root causes turned out to be completely different from where previous fixes were looking. The resize buttons were never broken at the event handling level. The real problem was an init race condition: renderPhotos() was fetching /photos before the backend was up, throwing an unhandled error, and killing the rest of initDashboard() before initResizeControls() ever ran. A waitForBackend() health poll now gates all data fetches, so resize listeners are always wired up regardless of how long the backend takes to start. The photo row contagion was caused by height: 100% on the photo resolving to the image’s natural aspect-ratio height during grid track sizing, inflating the row for every neighbor. Switching to position: absolute; inset: 0 on the image fixes the height to the tile bounds and removes it from the track sizing calculation entirely.
Goals this month is now its own separate widget card, extracted from the assignments card where it had been living under a rule separator.