Starting point
Information about hacker conference badges — hardware, software, editions, sources — is scattered across forums, blogs and repositories, and rarely structured or sourced.
badge.gallery — a source-linked hacker conference badge catalogue
badge.gallery is Franz Bettag's Swift/Vapor/Leaf/Fluent/SQLite application that catalogues hacker conference badges by event series, edition and badge, with sources, credits and image provenance.
Problem
Role
Franz Bettag's role
Builder of the catalogue and its research/editorial workflow.
Architecture
Stack
Swift, Vapor, Leaf and Fluent on SQLite.
Data model
Event series → edition → badge, with separate records for hardware, software, sources, credits, open issues and image provenance.
Editorial workflow
An AI-assisted research and editorial workflow produces structured drafts; validation and source-licensing gates govern what gets published. The live website itself has no runtime chat or RAG feature — the AI assistance is part of the editorial pipeline, not the shipped product.
Results and limitations
What's documented
Missing or uncertain evidence is explicitly recorded in the data model rather than estimated. Verified on 5 September 2026: 640 badge records, 194 passing tests and a passing image-policy audit with no missing referenced files. The catalogue continues to grow; these figures describe that checked snapshot.
Limitations
No claim of worldwide completeness. No synthetic or AI-generated badge images.
Evidence
Methodology and sources
Methodology, source ledger and image provenance are documented publicly on the site.
From this work to your project
AI results need verifiable boundaries
Source checks, human approval and tests determine whether an AI workflow holds up in practice. Before your project launches, we establish acceptable results, the failures that must be caught and who takes over when results are uncertain.
