craft-jitter VS recognize-anything-api

I think my favourite weekend project I've built was an image transformer plugin for Craft CMS. The popular (and only) free image plugin had been deprecated and the author was only going to continue supporting their paid version so I hacked together an Imgix-inspired plugin called Jitter[0] over the weekend.

It's not very popular but I like it and use it frequently.

[0]: https://github.com/codewithkyle/craft-jitter

I've not cleaned it up enough to push yet, but I packaged up an open source image recognition model (https://github.com/mnahkies/recognize-anything-api) and then wrote a script to crawl my photo library, run inference over each image and then write the results into the tag tables of digikams sqlite database (https://www.digikam.org/)

One thing I was fairly proud of was how scrappy the script was - I wrote it in typescript for the familiarity with the sqlite driver, but I used find and curl to actually do the crawling and API submission.

Is it hard to do that in pure typescript/node? No, but I was in a "how can I validate if this is even an interesting thing to be doing mode" and execing out to these tools was a way to get there slightly faster.

I've found that this attitude has been a great way to make weekend projects more fun and feel less like work.

Getting to some kind of tangible value sooner has also made easier to not lose interest halfway through and has been yielding me more semi-complete weekend projects (the word semi is doing a lot of work here tbf, but it's all relative)