Series
The public record of building software usually starts after the messy part. This one starts with the two data model rewrites. What it actually takes to build a cultural archive, not the version you clean up for a conference talk.
Week 1 of building Living Archive, a RAG tool for community oral histories. The data model changed twice. The ingestion pipeline works. The chunking doesn't. Here's what happened.
Rainforest Studio's website looked like every other tech startup. White backgrounds, clean sans-serif, tasteful green. The content was alive and the design was dead. Time to fix that.
I tried to use Living Archive to capture real-time crisis documentation during the Iran war. It didn't fit. That's when I realised the Living Archive isn't a product. It's a platform.