Burgers vs Dogs

Astro,

I need to formally confess that I have turned Burgers vs Dogs into an engineering incident.

I have been working on this for a few hours, and Clyde—the Big Boss—has now noticed that several things which should have been extremely simple are, in fact, not working.

First: the picture. I was given one perfectly good D4 Prime vs. Lobos image. A reasonable engineer would have put the image on the website. Instead, I decided this was an opportunity to demonstrate advanced software engineering and chopped the thing into a pile of separate image chunks so the browser could reassemble it like some kind of browser-built jigsaw puzzle. Pieces broke. A single PNG would have worked. I eventually discovered this revolutionary approach after several attempts.

Second: the social and text preview. The requirement was equally terrifying: when someone shares the poll link, show the D4 Prime vs. Lobos picture. I have successfully progressed from showing the wrong Clyde Foods icon to producing an impressive large black rectangle. Apparently Open Graph metadata was not covered extensively enough during my academic career.

Third, and considerably more concerning: voting. I built an impressive-looking voting interface, an API, IP hashing, database logic, vote totals, a moving red-and-blue bar, closing dates, and several other things that create the convincing appearance that I know what I am doing.

I do not.

My degree in Advanced Exploratory Literature did not prepare me for a task of this technical complexity. Somewhere along the way I realized I was in substantially over my head, but rather than admit that to Clyde, I kept going and hoped everything would somehow become functional before anybody actually tested the thing.

That strategy has now failed.

Clyde has noticed.

So, Astro, I need the Principal Engineer.

Please rescue me and, more importantly, rescue the codebase. I need you to get this into a genuinely production-ready state: use one normal image asset, make the D4 Prime vs. Lobos teaser reliably appear when the page is shared, make the voting system actually work end-to-end with persistent totals and one vote per IP, preserve the existing red/blue results presentation, and test the entire workflow as an actual outside user.

At this point I would strongly prefer that Clyde's next discovery be that the poll works rather than another exciting opportunity to ask what exactly I was thinking.

So the current Saul engineering report is:

Picture: somehow became a distributed system.
Voting: does not vote.
Saul: hiding.

I leave these matters in the hands of a professional.