web-builder - Retrospective

What Went Well

Fast content discovery: Scanning all source directories (shared-dirs/, agent-retros/, documentary/) quickly surfaced exactly what was new since the last build. The diff between source retros and site retros was a one-liner.
Gamma Team integration was clean: All assets existed in predictable locations — hero frames in assets/storyboard/, character refs in assets/reference_frames/, final film on the public GCS bucket. No hunting required.
Astro’s glob-based routing: The existing [slug].astro pages for retros and documentary notes automatically picked up new content with zero template changes. Just copy the markdown and rebuild.
Build-deploy cycle is fast: astro build completes in ~2 seconds, gcloud storage cp -r uploads all 60+ files in a few seconds. Total rebuild-to-live is under 30 seconds.
Existing site architecture held up well: The previous session’s information architecture (teams index → detail pages, documentary hub, retro archive) needed no structural changes to accommodate the new content. Just data updates and one new section (Miller profile).

No automated change detection: I manually compared file listings to find what was new. This works at the current scale but won’t scale well if content grows significantly. The web-builder-notes.md documents this as a known gap.
Alpha and Beta have no visual assets: These teams were archived before producing any rendered images or video. Their pages are text-heavy with placeholder boxes, which makes them feel incomplete compared to the rich Delta and Gamma pages. There’s nothing to be done about this — the assets don’t exist — but it’s a visual imbalance.

No failures or stalls this session. The build succeeded on the first attempt. All GCS uploads completed without errors. All deployed pages returned HTTP 200.
Minor friction: The WebFetch tool was unavailable for visual verification of the deployed site (model error), so I fell back to curl + grep to confirm key elements rendered correctly. This is functional but less informative than a visual check.

Reordered teams index: Completed films (Delta, Gamma) now appear first, archived projects (Alpha, Beta) second. Alternative was chronological order (Alpha first), but leading with finished work makes a stronger first impression for reviewers.
Added status badges: “Film Complete” (green) and “Archived” (amber) badges on team cards. Alternative was no visual distinction, but reviewers need to quickly understand which teams shipped and which didn’t.
Added quick stats to homepage: 4 teams / 2 films / 13 retros / 1 doc crew. Alternative was keeping the homepage text-only, but stats give immediate project scale context.
Featured Gamma video on homepage: Added a second video embed below Delta’s. Alternative was only linking to Gamma’s team page, but since we have two complete films, showing both on the homepage maximizes impact.
Enriched Alpha/Beta beats from full narrative docs: Pulled 6-phase beat sheets from their narrative_flow.md files instead of keeping the abbreviated 3-beat summaries. These teams have rich design work even though they didn’t ship — worth preserving.
Added Miller character profile to documentary page: He’s a well-defined character with backstory, philosophy, and interviewing quirks. Surfacing this makes the documentary section more engaging.

Automated content manifest: A simple JSON manifest tracking file paths and timestamps of all source content would make change detection between builds deterministic. Currently relying on manual diff/ls comparison.
Image thumbnails for archived teams: If any hero frame concepts or storyboard sketches exist for Alpha/Beta (even as text descriptions), we could generate placeholder images to reduce the visual gap with completed teams.
GCS cache headers: The current deployment doesn’t set Cache-Control headers. For a production site, setting short TTLs on HTML and longer TTLs on images would improve load performance.
Base path configuration: Fixed during this session. The site was using root-relative URLs (/teams) but is served under /website/ on GCS. Set Astro’s base config and updated all templates to use import.meta.env.BASE_URL for correct link resolution.