During February 2026, Brandon Wallace focused on backend reliability for the buape/carbon repository, addressing a critical issue with gateway heartbeat stability. He resolved a bug where the heartbeat state could become stale after disconnects or reconnects by resetting the lastHeartbeatAck flag, ensuring the gateway plugin maintained accurate state and reducing false heartbeat failures. To safeguard against regressions, Brandon introduced targeted tests that validated the new heartbeat behavior under various scenarios. His work, primarily using TypeScript and leveraging backend development and testing skills, contributed to improved uptime and resilience for the gateway component, though his contributions were limited to bug fixes during this period.