Product strategy

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.

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.