From Spec to Shipping is a 14-part series on how a protocol decoder actually gets written — the method GopherTrunk follows to go from an ETSI or TIA PDF to code that decodes real signals on air. From the Issue Tracker taught these lessons as postmortems: the round-trip test that validates its own bug, the placeholder constant that became a fabricated protocol, the RPC opcode nothing ever checked. This series teaches the same discipline forward — reading standards, choosing reference implementations you can trust, pinning parsers with literal byte vectors, building bit-identical conformance harnesses, staying clean-room, letting operator captures referee when references disagree, and gating every claim behind on-air verification.

The recurring villain is the test that passes because both sides share the same assumption; the recurring hero is the independent reference — another implementation, a reference codec, a reporter’s capture. Every part closes with rules that transfer to any wire format, not just radio.

Every post reads three ways: a TL;DR + cheat-sheet for skimmers, bold headers, tables, and diagrams for the medium read, and full prose with real code for the deep read.

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