Julien Barbe, home

Julien Barbe
Montpellier, France

Every field runs on unwritten rules.
I give them shape.

Botanists, researchers, teaching teams: I turn what they know into a precise need, then into working software.

Since 2009: plant identification, herbarium publishing, education platforms, biodiversity data. Today: tabular foundation models on ecological data, interfaces generated from a contract, and a few independent apps.

Now

Updated

  1. Heading I: Tabular models for ecology

    Where do tabular foundation models actually help on ecological data, and where don’t they?

    State
    Syntype v0.1 published and corrected; v0.1.1 waiting.

    Correction →

  2. Heading II: Generated interfaces

    Can a model build a usable interface from a contract, a component catalogue and checkable evaluators?

    State
    Synthetic data and first evaluators.

  3. Heading III: Independent apps

    Which of my own tools can pay for my time?

    State
    LoopHuntr being published, Daymon in private beta, NamerKit in development.

Side trips
A bookmark library sorted by a local model, couch games, a detective game set in 1913 London.

Work

Catalogue 001 to 016.

Selected

LoopHuntr: five proposed loops around a start point, offline; the first one is 38.5 km with 1,100 m of climb, 68% on tracks

002

LoopHuntr

Loops for gravel, road and mountain bikes, hiking and trail running, built on the iPhone from a start point, a distance and a climb. Offline once a region is downloaded.

Series
Independent apps
Period
2025–2026
Status
preparing the App Store release
Tales of Chinatown: Lala and Constable Durham around a lacquered coffin

003

Tales of Chinatown

A short detective game. Limehouse, 1913: connect clues, doubt what you are told, prepare the night. After Sax Rohmer.

Series
Games
Period
2026
Status
in development
Futon Fighters: two square fighters face to face

004

Futon Fighters

Couch games for up to four players on one screen: Ippon, a one-hit platform duel, and Fourtress, a split-screen first-person fight around a fort.

Series
Games
Period
2026
Status
in development
Daymon, today view: a day profile, the sessions of the day and 23 activities still to check

005

Daymon

Where working time actually goes. A local time tracker that shows what it is unsure about instead of guessing.

Series
Developer tools
Period
2025–2026
Status
private beta
Slyfari app icon

006

Slyfari

A private iOS browser with an encrypted video vault: what you save stays on the device, sealed with a key from the Keychain.

Series
Independent apps
Period
2026
Status
in development
Syntype: preliminary scores on species-trait tasks

007

Syntype

An open benchmark of tabular models on ecological data. Version 0.1 was corrected in public the day it came out.

Series
Research
Period
2026
Status
v0.1 corrected, v0.1.1 waiting

github.com/syntype/syntype ↗

Catalogue, continued

  1. 008

    NamerKit

    A naming studio for macOS: local or remote language models propose names, filters keep the reasons, and the newest mode shows unranked waves to sort by hand.

    Independent apps2026

    in development

  2. 009

    Rhizomes

    A daily journal written from the traces of agent sessions, and an archive other tools can query.

    Developer tools2025–2026

    being redesigned

  3. 010

    BackShelves

    Browse and restore backups from Backblaze B2, SFTP and local folders, down to a single table of a PostgreSQL archive.

    Developer tools2025–2026

    active

  4. 011

    Contributions

    Small fixes upstream: Apple Silicon support in NVIDIA’s structured-data-models (#1032), a Codex integration and a PostgreSQL TLS fix in tabularis (#264, #278).

    Open source2026

    merged

    NVIDIA PR #1032 ↗

  5. 012

    Biodiversity database

    Client: a regional government

    A regional biodiversity database: species records, taxonomy and maps for a very rich flora.

    Ecology2016–2023

    maintained

  6. 013

    Ecological data platform

    Client: a public research institute

    Plugins that take raw field inventories all the way to a published website.

    Ecology2023–

    active

  7. 014

    Admissions platform

    Client: a private higher-education group

    Multi-school admissions for a private higher-education group: from the application to enrolment, documents, payments and interviews included.

    Education2017–2026

    in production

  8. 015

    Campus platform

    Client: a private higher-education group

    The everyday system of the same group’s schools: timetables, grades, absences, admissions.

    Education2018–2026

    in production

  9. 016

    Support assistant

    Client: a private higher-education group

    Reads an application’s logs and proposes fixes. The agent runs confined, and every suggestion comes with the evidence it rests on.

    Education2025–2026

    in use

Notes

Short and dated. Corrections are added, never erased.


  1. Heading I
    Correction

    A second model reviewed Syntype and found four blocking issues: a survival task that mostly predicted harvest, modelled tree heights, a growth task solved by “next year equals this year”, and species reduced to their epithet. Public correction the same evening.

    Open the entry →


  2. Heading I
    Contribution

    Apple Silicon fix sent to NVIDIA’s structured-data-models: mps and mps:0 were treated as two different devices. Two lines, two tests. Issue #1031, PR #1032.


  3. Heading I
    Survey

    Survey of open ecological datasets, licence read on each repository page. Rows are plentiful; independent targets are the scarce resource.

Writing

Daymon rust / time-tracking / attribution

Multi-signal attribution in Daymon

The hardest problem in automatic time tracking isn’t capturing activity — it’s attributing it to the right project. When you switch between a browser tab, a terminal, and an IDE in the span of 30 seconds, which project owns that time?

Read the article →

Itinerary

  1. 2006 CESI Computer science training
  2. 2009 INRA, AMAP lab Lead developer, Pl@ntNet
  3. 2013 App Store First Pl@ntNet iOS app: identify a plant from a photo
  4. 2015 Independent Education platforms, biodiversity data, business applications
  5. 2026 Arsis Tabular models, generated interfaces, independent apps