srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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The business problem looked like a CRM integration. Bookings lived in a third-party portal. A self-hosted CRM could provide a better working view, so the obvious architecture was to copy the current records across on a schedule. That design failed the moment I asked what should happen when a booking changed silently or disappeared from … Read more
I did not set out to make a documentary archive of festival work. I was working. Sometimes I had a camera with me. Over the years, the photographs accumulated: a crew getting ready before the gates opened, a quiet stretch of grounds that would soon be crowded, glitter going on, an armload of leis moving … Read more
I could have started Seasoned Pan’s meal estimator by connecting a camera to a vision model and asking for calories. That would have produced an impressive demo and a dishonest product. Instead, I put four awkward, ordinary food photographs in front of the proposed response format before building the feature: a homemade taco, a frosted … Read more
Two event records share a venue and start time. Are they duplicates? At a single-stage club, probably. At a casino with several rooms or a festival with several stages, perhaps not. If one provider lists the headliner and another lists the full co-bill, title equality may be less useful than artist relationships. I stopped thinking … Read more
An automated event card needs a background. The calendar does not have original photography for every venue, and repeatedly generating fake concert photographs would blur an important line in the project. SoCalNomad is partly a photography platform. Synthetic imagery should fill a production gap without pretending to document a place I have not photographed. I … Read more
A new social format can look successful for the wrong reasons. The first carousel may receive more likes because it featured a famous artist. A post may satisfy existing followers without reaching anyone new. A format can grow reach while sending no one to the site. Without stored measurements, every explanation remains a story told … Read more
I had thousands of upcoming events in the calendar and no reason to expect anyone to browse all of them. “This Week in SoCal” turns the database into a short editorial slate for Instagram: one cover, a limited set of event cards, and a branded closing card. It runs for the coming weekend on Thursday … Read more
Three independent sources sounds like a responsible publication threshold. For a major tour announcement, it is easy to satisfy. National outlets, trade publications, label publicity, and entertainment sites all repeat the same announcement. For a legitimate club show or scene festival, three outlets may never cover it. A rigid source minimum can therefore measure publicity … Read more
I noticed the automated newsroom publishing mainstream arena acts while repeatedly overlooking punk, metal, hardcore, indie, and festival stories. The feeds were not the problem. Articles about those scenes were being ingested and passing the Southern California relevance filter. They were dying later because the system had accidentally defined local relevance as popularity inside its … Read more
The X publisher was not broken. It had posted 99 times. The schedule worked, content moved through the API, and the account accumulated an orderly history of links. It generated effectively no traffic for SoCalNomad. When the API credits ran out, buying more would have meant paying to preserve an automation whose only demonstrated output … Read more