Technical reflection

What the Gallery Prototype Got Right

The old Express and SQLite gallery is gone, but the lessons it forced on me are still in the current build.

  • February 19, 2026
  • Gallery Data Prototype
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Prototypes are allowed to be awkward

The gallery backend was a rough draft, but it did important work. It made duplicate handling, file validation, and metadata feel concrete instead of theoretical.

What stayed useful

A prototype can be successful even when the best outcome is deleting most of it and keeping the insight.

Related project

Where this write-up came from

Case study

Gallery Data Prototype

A small Express and SQLite experiment that taught me what I actually wanted from the gallery before moving to a cleaner archive and portfolio structure.

Status: Archived learning project

  • Express
  • SQLite
  • Node.js
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