What happened today
Quick morning check-in with Luis and Julie.
Julie shared her first mockups: the project is clearly moving forward on both sides. You can already see the shape of the tool, but also today’s sensitive topic: how to map metadata cleanly into the UI without turning everything into a monster of complexity.
Our strategy: move step by step to stay on track. The AI will suggest things, but the interface must remain simple for the editorial team.
On the ingestion side, Luis continues to explore the “multiple pipes in → multiple pipes out” model. Today our tool will feed Réfugiés.info, but tomorrow… who knows? The real challenge lies in designing an intermediate data model robust enough to last and flexible enough not to constrain anyone.
Challenges & surprises
I knew ingestion would be bumpy, but future interoperability questions keeps bugging me. We want to avoid locking ourselves into a rigid format — without drifting into abstraction paralysis.
And then there’s the eternal dilemma: how to prevent business complexity from leaking into the UI while keeping the tool accessible?
Technical focus of the day
A very product-tech day: I went from an empty folder to a clean turbo-repo with Supabase auth already wired in.
I’m genuinely impressed by how straightforward Supabase is. Their clean separation between user data and application data makes everything clearer — and honestly, it feels good.
I immediately isolated all components into a dedicated ui/ package to prepare the future design system.
And I spent some time taming the “moods” of Windsurf + Claude, which kept generating .md files everywhere. The result:
- a documentation guidelines doc,
- a script detecting stray Markdown files,
- and a pre-commit hook to keep everything tidy.
In the end, setting up the repo structure + auth took roughly one day with AI’s help. As always: simple on the surface, subtly complex underneath.
Human moment
The morning sync with Luis and Julie gave me a real boost. Seeing the team move forward on such different — yet deeply interconnected — topics is energizing. We’re building something together, not just a tool.
See you tomorrow.