Working notes

Adding a devblog to my site took three tries to deploy — a nested zip, a misplaced git init, and a commit Cloudflare refused to stop rebuilding. All three were the same mistake wearing different hats.

I pulled the two-seat workflow I use to build Loupe out into an open-source kit. The idea, and why it's a context-scaler, not a token-saver.

A wide day: shipped a dormant glass redesign and a fully responsive header, chased a stats box that kept clipping, root-caused six photo-pairing mis-binds down to a filename suffix, sorted out the faithful way to pull edited photos, relocated my notes vault, and ran a security review I'm keeping vague on purpose.

A long, many-threaded day. I built the full path that lets a second person's Apple-photo metadata become my app's enrichment database, turned the setup console into something that can actually start the pipeline stages itself, split the frontend out of the monolith, unified the brand across app and marketing site, stood up real email, and fixed a couple of bugs that had been silently breaking the photo pipeline for a while.

A long, many-threaded day: renamed both repos to loupe, shipped the Map and Cutting Room pages, built the in-app People view on top of face embeddings, redrew the brand mark down to the favicon, and stood up the onboarding front door.

Redesigned the month view's day cards into a contact-sheet film motif, polished the marketing site's desktop nav, survived a concurrent-edit collision that wiped my work off disk, and finally figured out what machine I've actually been building on.

The day Loupe stopped being a thing that only runs on my machine. I reframed it as a self-hostable product, made the pipeline portable through environment variables, scrubbed both repos clean for publishing, finalized a brand and header, fixed the photobook's repetition problem, and registered loupeculling.com for a marketing site.

The day the project got a name and a spine: I came back to a box that had silently rebooted, merged two sibling photo-review apps into one productionized service called Loupe, added a cloud backup and AI-written period summaries, and built an enrichment layer that joins Apple's own labels, people, and scores back onto my library by UUID.

A long day: turning a 462 GB copy into an instant rename by understanding the filesystem, catching two backup processes about to trample each other, and building two browser tools to actually review ~91,000 photos without ever deleting one by accident.

An aggressive package cleanup quietly broke my storage box's admin UI through a dependency I didn't know was load-bearing. Then a filename-normalizer bug taught me to trust byte sizes over names when matching files back to a database.

With the metadata database built, I started writing rules to surface delete-candidates. Two of the rules found nothing, one was secretly broken, and the biggest 'junk' bucket turned out to be footage I'd never delete. The lesson of the day: rules lie, pixels don't.

Day one of the photo project: build an ingest tool that reads ~91,000 photos and videos into a SQLite database so I can cull systematically. The build went fine. The environment fought me, and the performance lessons were not where I expected.