It was early, before the sun had settled in, when I sat down and opened the project again. The terminal blinked. A dusty SvelteKit blog I’d left sitting too long. The code was fine. It ran. It breathed. But it had grown wild in places. Dependencies grumbled like an old man’s knees. So I sharpened my tools.

I started with the bones. The eslint came first, like a man walking a fence line with a lantern in the dark. It pointed at the broken things. The prettier came after, quiet and meticulous, brushing away the noise, aligning things just so. Not everything wanted to change, but it did. I pressed save and watched the code fall into place like soldiers standing in line.

Then the packages — out of date, most of them. A few cried out when I tugged at their versions, but I spoke gently and coaxed them along. Some fought harder. I let them go. Others joined the march. At the end of it all, it still built. It still ran. But better. Cleaner. Like a knife that had been honed on a good stone.

There was no great victory to show. No shiny feature. But it was work that mattered. The kind of work no one talks about, but that keeps the walls standing and the fire lit. The blog lives on now — not louder, not fancier — just steadier. And sometimes that’s enough.