Phi Mage — who's writing, and why the logo is a φ

A first post, so: hello. I’m Eric Marchand — an open-source software writer, mostly by night 🌛.

Why “Phimage”, and that logo

Read the name out loud and it splits in two: Phi · mage. A little mage of phi — φ, the golden ratio.

That’s the whole logo, if you look:

• the gold bracket is a golden rectangle, left open
• the orange φ sits inside it — a circle with a bar through, the golden number itself
• put together, the two shapes read as a P — for Phimage

A φ and a rectangle, separated the way the golden ratio divides a line, arranged so the negative space spells the first letter of the name. That’s it. I like things that mean one more thing than they first appear to.

What I actually do

On GitHub I’m @phimage 🧙. Most of my public code is Swift 🐦, but I’m a happy Python 🐍, C++ ⚙️, Java ☕ and PHP 🐘 tinkerer too. You’ll find me across organisations like @ibanimatable, @ibdecodable and @oauthswift.

I’m drawn to AI and ML — LLMs, fine-tuning and optimization, a bit of data science — and the tools around them: PyTorch, Hugging Face, scikit-learn, Jupyter, pandas, etc…

What this blog is for

Field notes, mostly. AI tooling and developer workflows — what I’m learning by actually using this stuff.

And the 4D stuff lives elsewhere

By day I work in the 4D ecosystem (@mesopelagique 🐙 for experiments, @e-marchand 💼 for the day job). That has its own corner so it doesn’t crowd this one — it’s over at mesopelagique.github.io (blog).

That’s the introduction. The rest is field notes. 🌑