An operator admin panel
Building a super-admin area to support real users — org management, an audit log, plan overrides, and safe impersonation for debugging.
Today's build: a super-admin operator panel at /admin. Unglamorous, and the thing that makes everything else supportable.
The moment you have users, you have support tickets: "my events aren't showing up," "we need a few more projects on our plan," "something's wrong with our org and I can't tell what." You can answer those by SSHing into tinker and running raw queries — or you can build the tool once and stop being the bottleneck.
What's in it
- Organization list + detail + audit log. Every org at a glance, drill into one, and see a log of admin actions taken against it. The audit log is non-negotiable: if I'm going to give myself god-mode, every use of it should be recorded.
- Plan overrides. Comp an org's plan, grant bonus projects or extra quota — without touching Stripe. Sales and support need to say "yes" without a deploy.
- Impersonation. The big one. Assume a user's identity to see exactly what they see. Nine times out of ten, "it's broken" is a permissions or config issue that's invisible from the outside and obvious the second you're in their seat.
Impersonation done carefully
Impersonation is a loaded gun. So: it's super-admin only, it's written to the audit log on entry and exit, and there's an always-visible banner while it's active so I can never forget I'm acting as someone else. The convenience is the point; the guardrails are what let me sleep.
Why now, mid-sprint
Because the back half of this sprint ships a lot of surface area — watchers, alerting, dashboards. The more I ship, the more ways there are for something to go sideways for a user. Building the support tool before the surge means I can actually debug the surge.
Tomorrow: the feature I've been circling since day one — a real alert engine.