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.
Recently added
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
The public version of SoCalNomad looked simple enough: a WordPress site, a calendar subdomain, some articles, event pages, ads, and links out to ticket vendors. The inside was more interesting. Behind Cloudflare was a small home-origin production stack running on residential fiber with a business account. It was not large infrastructure, but it was layered … Read more
How a dining-room table, inherited camera gear, and unclaimed time during lockdown became a photography education.
An n8n AI Agent repeatedly called one tool until its iteration limit, leading to a version workaround and stronger repetition guards.
Documentation becomes a liability when current instructions, decisions, and historical evidence compete for authority.
Large workflow payloads, database results, and repeated documentation turned an AI coding session into a bounded-resource failure.