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 automation kept running. Scheduled jobs started on time. Processes exited. Logs continued to accumulate. Nothing obvious announced that the newsroom had stopped publishing. The external AI model it depended on was no longer available. Process Health Was Not Product Health NewsDesk uses language models for classification, entity extraction, clustering, and synthesis. At the time, … Read more
An integer primary key is unique inside its table. That last phrase is easy to forget. NewsDesk consumed articles from two source tables created by different stages of the editorial pipeline. Both tables assigned ordinary incremental IDs. Record 42 could therefore exist in both places and refer to two unrelated articles. A downstream cluster that … Read more
Automated publishers need a way to avoid repeating themselves. SoCalNomad’s NewsDesk already checked whether a recently published story covered the same artist. It also had a title-similarity backstop intended to catch near-duplicate headlines that slipped through the first check. I found ten legitimate stories on the wrong side of that backstop. Entertainment Headlines Share A … Read more
Invisible Infrastructure should not be treated as a single grant application. The National Geographic proposal gives the project a useful first shape: data centers, climate pressure, operational labor, resilience, cooling, power, and the physical systems behind digital life. That is the right foundation. But the proposal is not the whole story. I do not expect … Read more
Most image pipelines are designed around delivery. Take a large upload, rotate it correctly, resize it, compress it, and keep the version the application can display efficiently. That is usually a sensible way to build a website. Markit had a different requirement. The photographs were not decoration. They were evidence used to identify an object, … Read more
I started Markit with a tempting automation idea: take item photos and turn them into marketplace listings. That sounds straightforward until the object is old, unlabeled, damaged, unusual, collectible, or valuable. Then the risk moves from formatting a listing to making claims that may not be true. The boundary became clear very early. I want … Read more
The glamorous part of my Markit idea is the AI appraisal. Take photos of an object, identify what it might be, gather evidence, estimate value, and generate listing drafts for marketplaces. That is the part people notice. The less glamorous part is more important: getting the photos into the system without making the workflow miserable. … Read more
The longer SoCalNomad ran, the less the interesting work looked like feature development. It looked like operations. That is not a complaint. It is what happens when a project becomes real. Once people and crawlers can reach it, every change has a blast radius. Every cache has a memory. Every workflow has a schedule. Every … Read more
I could see newsletter subscriptions accumulating in the list manager as unconfirmed. That seemed normal at first. Double opt-in begins in an unconfirmed state and becomes active after the subscriber clicks a message. The confirmation message was never being sent. Two Endpoints Created Similar Records The signup path posted to Listmonk’s administrative subscriber endpoint. That … Read more
I understand why email open rate dominates campaign conversations. It appears near the top of the funnel and usually produces a large number. It is also one of the easiest campaign metrics to misunderstand. An “open” is typically an image request. The recipient’s mail client requests a tiny tracking image, and the analytics system records … Read more