Why I built an astrophotography processing suite from scratch in C++
Siril was right there. Why I spent four years writing my own astrophotography suite in C++, and what I’d do differently.
I’m Ezequiel. I build software for a living and photograph the night sky for the love of it, and this notebook is where both end up. I’m a Principal Software Engineer on penetration-testing software, and before that I worked on security and infrastructure monitoring and the backend services around them. Coding agents write a lot of the code now; deciding what gets built, and reviewing what they write down to the assembly when it matters, is the part I never delegate, and one of the threads here. On clear nights I’m out under the southern sky with a camera on a telescope; on cloudy ones I work on AfterNight, an open-source astrophotography processing suite tuned down to SIMD and GPU code, and write up every algorithm: the problem, the code, the numbers.
every post has a “what didn’t work” section — the honest part

Now building
Open-source astrophotography processing suite in C++: calibration, registration, stacking, gradient removal and more.
Now writing
Coding agents on a 20-year-old C++ codebase: the workflow, the guardrails, and what I still do by hand.
02 posts, numbers included
20+ years in software
Siril was right there. Why I spent four years writing my own astrophotography suite in C++, and what I’d do differently.
Several jobs at one company, and why I’m writing down how software works underneath now that agents write so much of it.