Writing

Longer pieces on building software, contributing to open source, and the developer workflow as it changes.

• postgresql / postgis / civictech2026-05-17

  What it took to put six cities' affordable housing data on one map

  I wanted to compare affordable housing per capita across NYC and San Francisco. Their open-data portals had other ideas. Six cities, one PostGIS schema, and the year-long work of making other people's work possible.

• opensource / beginners / career2026-05-17

  What I learned opening my first sixty open source pull requests

  Twelve days ago my GitHub account had zero contributions on it. Today there are about sixty PRs across twenty-something repos. Here's what I got wrong, in the actual order I got it wrong.

• go / ai / opensource2026-05-17

  Building a linter for the bugs AI agents actually make

  I lost an hour last Tuesday to a function that didn't exist. Then I noticed it had a shape, and so did most of the other bugs I'd been hitting. So I wrote a Go CLI that catches them.