Build Log — Full Sail University · CS Capstone · DANIEL VINCENT

Project Culper

A 5-month build-in-public log documenting the design and development of a multi-tenant intelligence aggregation platform. Weekly posts covering architecture decisions, NLP research, implementation notes, and honest retrospectives.

Stack: React · TypeScript · Python · NLP/NER

● Active

Feature Preview

Named Entity Recognition

As an operator types a narrative entry, the system automatically detects and highlights named entities such as people, locations, vehicles, and organization in real time.

Hovering overing an entity surfaces a persistent tooltip with linked profile data pulled from across all entries in the system turning a text document into a live intelligence graph.

Demonstration of real-time named entity recognition in Project Culper. Entities such as people, locations, and vehicles are underlined with a purple-to-blue gradient as the operator types, with hover tooltips surfacing linked profile data.

Prototype UI — entity hover cards with linked profile data

Latest Entry

  • Devblog 4.1

    This week on Project Culper, I built out tenant invites: the piece we needed before we could start real multi-user testing. Up to now, the only way into a tenancy was the original signup flow, meaning every tester needed a separate workspace. That is not how the product will actually be used, so I added…

    Read more: Devblog 4.1

All Posts

  • Devblog 3.4

    Teaching Culper to Learn: NER Training Is Live One of the core promises behind Project Culper is that the system should get smarter over time. Not just smarter in a general sense, but smarter about your organization’s intelligence data. This week, we shipped the feature that makes that possible: on-demand NER (Named Entity Recognition) training.…

    Read more: Devblog 3.4

  • Devblog 3.3

    Building the Knowledge Graph for Project Culper One of the big ideas behind Project Culper is that intelligence entries shouldn’t just sit in a list. Real field work is relational: a name shows up in one report, comes back in another, and over time starts painting a picture. The knowledge graph is how we actually…

    Read more: Devblog 3.3

  • Devblog 3.2

    Building a Retroactive Entity Linking Agent with FastAPI and spaCy One of the core challenges in any intelligence or research platform is connecting the dots between raw text and structured data. Names appear in entries, but unless those names are formally tied to known entities, they are just strings. A feature I recently shipped closes…

    Read more: Devblog 3.2

  • Devblog 3.1

    Building Intelligence Import: How Project Culper Handles Legacy Data One of the hardest problems in deploying any intelligence platform isn’t building the new system. It’s bringing years of existing data into it without losing the human context behind every record. This week we shipped self-service data import for Project Culper. The import pipeline accepts CSV…

    Read more: Devblog 3.1

  • Devblog 2.4

    CSV Import and Dynamic Entry Types One of the feedback points I kept coming back to during planning was this: field intelligence tools live or die by how easy it is to get data in. If migrating from a legacy system means manually re-entering hundreds of incident reports, nobody is switching. This week I built…

    Read more: Devblog 2.4

  • Devblog 2.3

    Project Culper Dev Blog: Entity Resolution and the Underline System This week on Project Culper, the work centered on two connected problems: how the backend resolves a detected span against the entity registry, and how the frontend communicates that result to the agent visually. The entity resolution pipeline now runs in three tiers. When the…

    Read more: Devblog 2.3

  • Devblog 2.2

    This week on Project Culper, the work shifted from wiring the backend skeleton to making the product actually feel like a product. We touched three areas: the NER entry editor, the beginning of the landing page, and the full user journey from account creation to submitting a first intelligence entry. The Narrative Field and NER…

    Read more: Devblog 2.2

  • Devblog 2.1

    Project Culper: Month 2 Week 1 Progress Update This week’s work spanned three areas: backend route development, frontend containerization, and repository housekeeping. Backend Route Layer With authentication wired and all 12 tables live, the focus shifted to implementing the API routes the frontend will actually call. The entries route now has a full CRUD set:…

    Read more: Devblog 2.1

  • Devblog 1.4

    Month 1 closed out with two major milestones: a working AWS deployment pipeline and a fully migrated database schema. On the infrastructure side, the EKS cluster is live in us-east-1 with two t3.medium worker nodes. Traffic flows through an Application Load Balancer with SSL termination handled by AWS Certificate Manager, routing to four subdomains: the…

    Read more: Devblog 1.4

  • Devblog 1.3

    This week I laid the foundation that everything else in Project Culper will be built on top of. No features yet. Just the environment that makes building features possible without stepping on each other. On the infrastructure side, we finalized our deployment architecture on AWS. The application will run on EKS with a single cluster…

    Read more: Devblog 1.3
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