https://davidgomez.cc/devblog.html Working notes on building Loupe, side projects, and learning in tech. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/notes-under-version-control.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/notes-under-version-control.html Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT My entire knowledge base had no undo, and adding one turned out to be a real distributed-systems puzzle because the same files live on four machines at once. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/loupe-ml-pipeline-on-your-own-hardware.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/loupe-ml-pipeline-on-your-own-hardware.html Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT For an app that looks at your private photos, the machine learning cannot phone home, so every model in Loupe runs on your own machine, on a single consumer graphics card. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/how-loupe-decides-what-to-keep.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/how-loupe-decides-what-to-keep.html Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/dashboard-learned-to-reach-my-phone.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/dashboard-learned-to-reach-my-phone.html Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Turned the fleet dashboard into an installable phone app with alerts tiered by urgency, a critical channel that survives the app itself failing, and a dead-man's switch that can announce its own death. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/compute-box-thermal-safety-net.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/compute-box-thermal-safety-net.html Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT My busiest compute machine was cooking itself under real load, so instead of just turning the work off, I built layers of protection that let it keep running without frying. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/searching-notes-by-meaning.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/searching-notes-by-meaning.html Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT I taught my notes to answer questions by meaning, so I can ask what I decided about X and why and land on the right note even without remembering a single word from it. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/knowledge-base-rebuilds-itself.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/knowledge-base-rebuilds-itself.html Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT I write a lot of scattered notes across a lot of projects, and instead of ever organizing them by hand, I built a pipeline that rebuilds and reorganizes the whole thing every night while I sleep. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/running-my-own-models.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/running-my-own-models.html Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT A lot of the small jobs I was paying a hosted model to do did not need a frontier model at all, so I started running open-weight models on my own GPU box and let the routine work run for free. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/handing-work-to-any-machine.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/handing-work-to-any-machine.html Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT I stopped doing my machines' work at the keyboard and built a way to hand a task to whichever machine should run it, let it run on its own, and pick up the result later. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/control-plane-outage-failover.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/control-plane-outage-failover.html Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT I caused an outage by running a heavy job on the one machine that holds everything together, then spent the night proving my failover plan actually works. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/a-dashboard-that-became-a-second-brain.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/a-dashboard-that-became-a-second-brain.html Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/storage-link-throughput-mystery.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/storage-link-throughput-mystery.html Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Every cheap health check told me my storage link was perfectly healthy while it was actually running at a tenth of its speed, and the real work was proving which piece was lying. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/every-machine-reaches-every-other.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/every-machine-reaches-every-other.html Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Turned the fleet into a full mesh where every machine can reach every other one directly, passwordless, without hand-managed keys, laying the groundwork for running work anywhere in the fleet. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/moving-the-front-door.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/moving-the-front-door.html Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Moved the public tunnel entrance off the busy compute box onto its own dedicated Raspberry Pi with its own uplink, so a reboot of any other machine can no longer take the whole public site down. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/swiss-redesign-gpu-box-and-a-wiki-over-my-notes.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/swiss-redesign-gpu-box-and-a-wiki-over-my-notes.html Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/the-demo-is-the-app.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/the-demo-is-the-app.html Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/demo-library-and-graph.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/demo-library-and-graph.html Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/breadcrumbs-reading-my-own-grocery-pages.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/breadcrumbs-reading-my-own-grocery-pages.html Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT breadcrumbs is a free, open-source browser extension I built to read my own logged-in grocery order pages and export a clean, itemized file, every item by name, with the price, so my budget knows what the basket actually held. Two store integrations work, the Chrome version is verified end to end, and a Safari port is in progress. This is what it is, why I built it, and what's still open. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/tandem-two-seats-as-a-repo.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/tandem-two-seats-as-a-repo.html Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT I already wrote up the idea of running two Claudes in tandem, one to think and one to build. This is the project cut: what Tandem actually is as a toolkit, why I bothered packaging a personal habit into an MIT repo, how the pieces fit, and what's still rough. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/demo-without-a-backend-and-a-render-pull-that-lied.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/demo-without-a-backend-and-a-render-pull-that-lied.html Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Built a static, backend-free demo of the Loupe cull UI, untangled an edited-render pull that reported success while writing nothing, fixed an importer that choked on Live Photos, and reorganized all my project notes into one place. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/first-offsite-backup-lazy-renders-and-moving-my-notes.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/first-offsite-backup-lazy-renders-and-moving-my-notes.html Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/three-ways-to-break-a-deploy.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/three-ways-to-break-a-deploy.html Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/one-repo-and-scrubbing-history.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/one-repo-and-scrubbing-history.html Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/daily-log.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/daily-log.html Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/portable-import-and-a-brand-pinned-down.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/portable-import-and-a-brand-pinned-down.html Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/rename-connect-faces-brand.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/rename-connect-faces-brand.html Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/contact-sheet-deepens-by-zoom.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/contact-sheet-deepens-by-zoom.html Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/from-my-box-to-a-product.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/from-my-box-to-a-product.html Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/one-app-called-loupe.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/one-app-called-loupe.html Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/the-move-that-moved-nothing.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/the-move-that-moved-nothing.html Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/a-dependency-cascade-and-matching-files.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/a-dependency-cascade-and-matching-files.html Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/rules-that-find-nothing.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/rules-that-find-nothing.html Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/building-a-metadata-pipeline-no-sudo.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/building-a-metadata-pipeline-no-sudo.html Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/cloud-capstone-aws.html https://davidgomez.cc/devblog/cloud-capstone-aws.html Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT My cloud course capstone made me do the whole job, price an architecture before building it, stand it up on AWS, make it survive load, and move its data to a second cloud.