I built a CLC Northeaster Dory in my garage in 2020. The hardest part of choosing it was not the woodworking. It was finding honest numbers: how long the boat really is, what it is built from, and how many hours it took people like me. That is why I built Boat Build Log , a Laravel 13 and MySQL 8 site where amateur builders log their builds and every design gets a page with real medians from those logs.

The logs need a catalog of designs to hang on. It has 1,052 design pages from dozens of designers, plus a few hundred production boats for people who restore rather than build. This post is about how the specs and write-ups for all of those got into the database, and how they stay there.

The problem

The catalog started as plain PHP arrays in database/seeders/data , one file per vendor, crawled from the designers' own listings. Each vendor publishes differently, so the files have different shapes. CLC gives a beam, Glen-L mostly does not, Devlin has his own format, and so on.…