I built a comic book app for my father-in-law

Most of what I build is designed to expose something uncomfortable. Foreign Influence Operations. Scam ad networks. Propaganda infrastructure. The work is useful but it is not exactly light.

So this is a different kind of post.

My father-in-law has a bande dessinée collection. A serious one. The kind that takes over rooms and requires a system. At some point the question became: which albums does he already have? The answer, when you are standing in a bookshop holding a potential duplicate, is not easy to find on a phone.

He needed something simple. Scan a barcode, know immediately whether it is already on the shelf.
I built it in a weekend. Then kept adding things.

What it does

Bulles is a web app for cataloguing BD collections. You scan an ISBN barcode with your phone camera. It looks up the album metadata: series name, volume number, authors, publisher, year, cover image. You confirm and it is saved to your collection.

That is the core. The rest followed from using it.

A collection page with covers, searchable and filterable. Statistics: how many albums per series, which volumes are missing, ratings, reading status. An export. A cover picker that lets you choose between anything the community has uploaded. A gap detector that finds holes in a series you are collecting.

I build things for problems I find interesting. Most of the time those problems involve platforms or state actors that would prefer not to be looked after. But the skill is the same whether you are scraping a FIMI domain registry or building a bande dessinée database. You find the structure, you handle the edge cases, you make it reliable.

Building something for one specific person with a specific need is a different kind of satisfaction from publishing an investigation report. There is no policy implication. There is no press coverage. There is just my father-in-law, standing in a bookshop, scanning a barcode, and knowing in two seconds whether he already owns that Spirou.

That is enough.

If you collect BD and want access, get in touch with him at Bulles.app.