Thoughts, tutorials, and tales from the digital frontier. Lessons learned and wisdom shared.
Search results are full of pages selling a scanner or a PDF tool, all skipping the step that decides success. Here's the process that actually works for turning a shoebox of cards into searchable, structured recipes.
Read moreEveryone asks the price per card. It's the wrong question. The OCR runs about thirty cents a box; the real bill is ten hours of human review. Here's the honest math and three ways to handle it.
Read moreOCR demos always use a clean printed card. Real recipe boxes are faded and handwritten, where OCR fails in ways that quietly ruin the dish. Here's what breaks, and what actually fixes it.
Read moreThe commit history tells a story. Not the one I planned. The one where every assumption I made about backups got corrected by production.
Read moreA backup that can't be restored is a zip file you feel good about. Building the restore side taught me how many ways a restore can succeed while failing.
Read moreThe first version had a big switch statement. Every strategy duplicated the compression logic. Then I realized what I actually had were composable steps.
Read moreI had a Node app that logged successful backups to Discord. Failures were silent. I found an eleven-day gap by accident. So I built something better.
Read moreWeekend experiment is over. This is what happens when you put it to work. Invoices and purchase orders arriving by email, dozens a day, and someone spending half their day typing fields into a system. Email to S3 to Lambda to done.
Read moreEvery recipe app I tried was designed for the same thing: browsing. Scrolling. Saving links. They were good at collecting recipes and terrible at the part where you actually cook them. Cooking isn't reading. Cooking is a sequence of timed actions where your hands are busy and your attention is split between three things on the stove.
Read morePeople hear "I replaced my OCR pipeline with a vision model" and the first thing they ask about is cost. Fair question. I assumed it would be expensive too. Under a penny per document.
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