Python

Culling a hundred-thousand-photo library should never come down to one mysterious score, so I split the decision into three plain roles that each answer a different question.

Pulled fleet health and my entire notes vault onto one gated dashboard, then added semantic search over my own work by borrowing an embedding model already running elsewhere on the network.

Reskinned davidgomez.cc into a Swiss/International typographic system, stood up a GPU box and proved face-embedding on CUDA, and hand-built a regenerable wiki over every one of my notes.

The marketing demo stopped being a screenshot tour and became the actual Loupe app running over a hand-authored fixture, every view wired in owner mode, real detected face crops, a library full of believable junk frames, and a production deploy.

Built a reusable image generator to manufacture a synthetic photo library for the public cull demo, wired the static demo to behave like the real app across several views, and ran a graphify pass to map the app's architecture and data flow.

The whole project finally lives somewhere other than my one machine: I pushed a private backup of the repo. Then a small but careful change to how the app resolves edited renders so it stops statting thousands of network files on every restart, plus a power-outage readiness check and a move of my project notes vault out of the folders iCloud sweeps.

I merged Loupe's pipeline repo into the app repo as a subtree, untangled a code-vs-data path coupling that would have quietly broken everything, and then (right before the first push to a private GitHub repo) ran a full-history audit that came back dirty. It found a home address, GPS coordinates, and a dump of my home network's internal layout buried in old commits. The rest of the day was rewriting history to purge all of it, normalizing my commit identity, and collapsing everything to a single clean branch.

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.

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.