Everything That Broke Along the Way
The commit history tells a story. Not the one I planned. The one where every assumption I made about backups got corrected by production.
Read moreThe Chronicle
Thoughts, tutorials, and tales from the digital frontier. Lessons learned and wisdom shared.
Restores Are Harder Than Backups
A 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 Pipeline Strategy Pattern
The 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 Built My Own Backup System
I 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 moreFrom Inbox to Database Without a Human in the Middle
Weekend 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 moreWhy I Built Flour Power
Every 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 moreLess Than a Penny Per Document
People 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.
Read moreOne API Call Changed Everything
Sunday morning. I'm close to just giving up and typing everything by hand. But I want to try one more thing. Instead of OCR to get characters, what if I just ask a vision model what the document says?
Read moreWhen the Cleanup Code Becomes the Project
Tesseract can't handle the handwriting. Time to spend some money. AWS Textract has built-in handwriting detection. It's better. But "better" and "good enough" are different things.
Read moreThe OCR Rabbit Hole
Long weekend. I've got a pile of handwritten documents that need to become structured data. Should be a weekend project. OCR exists, it's been around forever, this is a solved problem. Right?
Read moreStay on the Path
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