A Book Is a Build Artifact: 1,109 Trip Items to a Hardcover
TL;DR After a week at a backcountry cabin, I turned about 1,109 photos, videos and clips into a 94-page hardcover for my trip buddy, in about six days, as a build pipeline instead of a layout session. The stages: a media catalog, local speech-to-text, vision records for every item, sharp-frame harvesting from video, 1,229 fact claims run through verifier and skeptic agents, an equal-billing balance check, WeasyPrint to render, a custom pikepdf finisher to hit PDF/X-3, and a 28-check preflight. Final preflight: 0 failures, 13 warnings, each warning with a written reason. The interesting bugs were all data bugs: a camera clock 54 minutes fast, Whisper hallucinating text over wind, iCloud photos that were not actually on disk, and an AI that badged a fish off a receipt. If you can express a book as data plus a build, then review, regression tests and reproducibility come for free. That is the whole idea. The brief The trip is covered in another post, which was about the live page that ran during it. This one is about what came after. I wanted to give my buddy something physical, and I wanted it to feel like a bound volume of an old geographic magazine, not a photo-book template. ...