A folder of documents becomes rows, the rows are processed in batches rather than one at a time, and nothing leaves until a person has marked it reviewed. The gate is the product.
Blog
2026
Running 7 scanners is a thread pool and an afternoon. Making them agree on what a finding is — one shape, one severity scale, one row per problem — is the whole product.
A corpus of 340,920 observations from 18 catalogues, collapsed into 120,063 canonical events across 90,565 victims. Deciding which records describe the same incident is the whole product — and a 3-year rebuild of a 2023 original.
Arabic, English and Hebrew, collected and enriched by a worker with a queue per stage. The same 6 stages as everything else in this series, except a shift depends on them being up.
Six megabytes of exported messages, labelled and filtered by a few dozen keyword rules. No model, no API bill, nothing leaving the laptop — and every label traceable to the line that produced it.
Some sources have no export button and no intention of building one. Record what the source draws as it draws it, give every object a stable key, and you own a dataset the source never published.
Testing whether a point falls inside an area is one line of code. Deciding whether an object was actually there takes the whole sequence of observations, and a threshold you have to pick yourself.
The same 6 stages as a one-file watcher, except every one of them has grown into a component: continuous collection, cross-posting detection, machine translation, an AI pass, a map and a dashboard.
Two files, no shared identifier, and one question: which rows describe the same real-world thing? About 60 lines of Python, 2 arbitrary decisions, and one bug that quietly inflated the answer.
A ship that switches off its transponder disappears from the data you have. Satellite detection plus an AIS cross-check gives you a second look that does not depend on the ship's cooperation.