Performance

A live practice-exam submission returned a 502 and the retry said 'already submitted', leaving a permanent error in front of a button that could never succeed. The proxy had a five-second default nobody had questioned, the submit path took 29 seconds, and the first optimization made it slower. The fixes preserved output exactly or were reverted.

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.

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 managed 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.

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.