I'm a software developer with 20+ years of experience building things you've probably used, from glitch to healthcare.gov. I've led teams, run engineering orgs, and shipped more code than I can reasonably claim to remember. Lately I've been working at the intersection of AI and healthcare, helping states move fast on their response to HR1.
and other stuff.
I've been writing things online in some form since 2004. This is an attempt to bring it all together, regardless of it's shape or completeness. I'm following a "digital garden" model, where some posts are seeds meant to grow and some are weird political takes from ten years ago frozen in amber.
Every few months someone proposes putting data centers in space. The renderings look cool. Then you run the numbers and physics crushes your dreams. Here's why this idea keeps resurfacing even though the underlying problems haven't changed in fifty years.
After discovering I'm definitely not a "growth team" person and watching Glitch wind down, I'm back in civic tech where I belong – this time in an AI Residency at Propel. We're building tools to help states and SNAP beneficiaries navigate HR1's massive changes, including new penalties that charge states more money for higher error rates. During the recent shutdown, I built crawlers to get real-time benefit updates to folks and created the most comprehensive database of active food pantries using AI tools. It's not the sexy AI that gets TED talks – it's the kind that keeps benefits from being wrongly terminated because we finally taught a system that gig work counts as employment.
I love surfing the web, and I think we should all link to websites more often. Here are some links out to folks more interesting and clever than me.
GitHub Actions has a package manager that ignores decades of supply chain security best practices: no lockfile, no integrity verification, no transitive pinning
You can get almost everything done with Vanilla CSS.
I love Oakland, and I am so excited to go to more Oakland B's games next year. The community around the team is so fun, and I didn't really get a chance to experience that until the end of the first season.
Let me make the argument why you should start self-hosting more of your personal services.
An excellent guide to using modern CSS color techniques, that make it easy to spin up entire color systems with just a few properties