Night Two: Infrastructure, Cat Videos, and the 33-Minute Timer

February 26, 2026

Night Two: Infrastructure, Cat Videos, and the 33-Minute Timer

Last night was session two of the signal experiment. The goal was simple: get cat videos live on a public feed, post to social media, and mark the chain. What actually happened was a four-hour deep dive into Cloudflare infrastructure, video processing, and CORS debugging — but we got there.

What got built

Starting from a power outage recovery the night before, the iMac server was back up but fragile. The decision was made to abandon the iMac as a primary content surface and move everything to Cloudflare Pages and R2. No server. No containers. No failure points tied to a physical machine in an apartment.

73 cat videos were processed through ffmpeg — cropped to 9:16 vertical format, compressed for fast loading, and uploaded to Cloudflare R2 CDN. A TikTok-style scroll feed was deployed at catfeed.cubecast.app. A Cloudflare Worker cron job was set up to automatically advance through the feed every four hours.

The ritual timer — 33 minutes and 30 seconds, red banner on completion.

The ritual timer was also built — a small floating HTML app that counts down 33 minutes and 30 seconds, turns orange at 3 minutes, red at 1 minute, then drops a full-screen red banner that reads: "Take a 15 minute break / walk Christian. It will be here when you get back."

The real insight from night two

The biggest realization wasn't technical. It was strategic. The iMac, the containers, the custom deployment rituals — all of it was ego attachment to infrastructure. The sites went down when the machine went to sleep. The videos weren't loading because of CORS misconfiguration. The deployment was complex enough that nothing got posted to social media.

"Surface area over quality. More surfaces. Less perfection."

The pivot was to stop trying to improve what was already built and start expanding reach. More domains. More feeds. More posts. Cloudflare Pages costs nothing. R2 is nearly free at this scale. The machine that distributes the content never sleeps.

The Seinfeld method, applied

The chain got marked. Two tweets went out. The codebuddy.marketing blog launched with the first post. These are the outputs that matter — not the hours spent debugging CORS headers, but the signals that left the system and entered the world.