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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I had already accepted that attribution was incomplete. That still left a practical problem: what language should appear next to a number in a report? I settled on four labels. They are not sophisticated, but they stop a dashboard from quietly upgrading evidence as it moves from an event log to a presentation. Measured Measured … Read more
The usual web-image advice tells me to compress harder. That is sensible when the image is decorative or when an oversized upload is slowing an otherwise lightweight page. It becomes less useful when original photography is part of the reason the page exists. Concert images are particularly good at exposing the cost of a generic … Read more
I received a suspicious email that looked, at first glance, like evidence of a compromised mail server. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to skip the boring investigation step when the message looks alarming. A spoofed display name, a familiar sender address, and an unexpected recipient can make the situation feel worse than the … Read more
Analytics dashboards make it easy for me to become overconfident. A chart shows visits. A campaign shows clicks. A tracked link shows engagement. It is tempting to keep walking the conclusion forward until the dashboard appears to prove revenue, appointments, leads, or sales. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. I wrote the Matomo measurement … Read more
A photograph is not always one file. It may begin as a camera RAW file, acquire an XMP sidecar, become a full-resolution TIFF or JPEG, and produce separate Web, social, press, and print exports. A normal folder makes those relationships understandable to a person. A DAM needs to preserve them without confusing a derivative for … Read more
I did not want the first version of the DAM to depend on a message broker. It needed to ingest large batches of photography reliably, survive interruption, and make its current state obvious when something went wrong. For one operator on a local network, adding a database and queue service would have created more infrastructure … Read more
Most digital asset management systems want to become the center of the universe. They ingest the files, create database records, manage metadata, expose search, generate previews, and eventually become the only comfortable way to understand what exists. That can work, but it creates a risk: the application becomes more authoritative than the archive. The DAM … Read more
AI tools are easier to use than they are to manage. The first few wins can make the process feel magical. A model drafts code, explains an error, rewrites documentation, or finds a missing assumption. Then the same model starts making architectural decisions it was not asked to make, changing scope midstream, or treating a … Read more
Most project work disappears because it was never captured in a useful shape. The decision was made in a chat window. The fix lived in a terminal scrollback. The reason for a tradeoff was obvious at the time, then impossible to reconstruct six weeks later. By the time a project is interesting enough to write … Read more
I did not expect Google Search Console to become part of deployment acceptance. It often feels like one because it reports failure. Pages are not indexed. Sitemaps are not read. URLs are discovered but ignored. Phantom 404s accumulate. Structured data is incomplete. Crawled pages remain excluded. But Search Console is really an external acceptance test. … Read more