{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "Stephen Taylor", "home_page_url": "https://stephentaylor.com", "feed_url": "https://stephentaylor.com/feed.json", "description": "Stephen Taylor builds at the intersection of political strategy, software engineering, and media intelligence. Senior political adviser, full-stack developer, and AI integration specialist.", "language": "en-CA", "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com" } ], "items": [ { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/analyzing-a-provincial-budget-in-thirty-minutes", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/analyzing-a-provincial-budget-in-thirty-minutes", "title": "Analyzing a Provincial Budget in Thirty Minutes", "summary": "I used multi-agent AI to analyze the Alberta budget and publish a comprehensive website — 25 sector breakdowns, 26 audience guides, and 40 stakeholder briefs — in thirty minutes. What this means for government relations, AI policy analysis, and the future of public affairs.", "date_published": "2026-03-27T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "AI", "Strategy" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/analyzing-a-provincial-budget-in-thirty-minutes-og.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-heritage-guide-technical-deep-dive", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-heritage-guide-technical-deep-dive", "title": "Building Heritage Guide: A Technical Deep Dive", "summary": "The technical architecture behind Heritage Guide — a Python scraping pipeline, MongoDB with geospatial indexing, React SSR with 27,500 prerendered pages, AI-powered semantic search with HNSW vector indexes, and a production deployment on a Raspberry Pi.", "date_published": "2026-02-12T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/building-heritage-guide-technical-deep-dive/hero-raspi.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/heritage-guide-communications-strategy", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/heritage-guide-communications-strategy", "title": "Getting Heritage Guide Noticed: SEO, AI Outreach, and a National Campaign", "summary": "Building Heritage Guide was only half the challenge. The other half was making sure people knew it existed — through aggressive SEO, AI-powered reporter outreach, and the campaign infrastructure of a national public affairs firm.", "date_published": "2026-02-12T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Strategy", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/heritage-guide-communications-strategy/hero-letterpress-campaign.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/saving-canadas-heritage-register", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/saving-canadas-heritage-register", "title": "Saving Canada's Heritage Register", "summary": "When Parks Canada announced it was deleting the Canadian Register of Historic Places, I rebuilt the entire 13,554-site database as a modern bilingual web application in under 24 hours. The story of Heritage Guide — and why government digital infrastructure does not have to be disposable.", "date_published": "2026-02-12T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/saving-canadas-heritage-register/hero-heritage-cornerstone.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/why-pdf-tools-should-not-upload-your-files", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/why-pdf-tools-should-not-upload-your-files", "title": "Why PDF Tools Should Not Upload Your Files", "summary": "Most online PDF tools upload your documents to remote servers. That is a problem. Here is what actually happens when you use Smallpdf, iLovePDF, and Adobe — and why client-side processing is the only model that respects your privacy.", "date_published": "2026-02-12T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "Security" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/why-pdf-tools-should-not-upload-your-files/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-software-for-scientific-instruments", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-software-for-scientific-instruments", "title": "Building Software for Scientific Instruments", "summary": "What it means to be the sole software lead for a geophysics instrumentation company — building everything from mobile field apps to a cross-platform desktop application to a web mapping platform.", "date_published": "2026-02-10T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/building-software-for-scientific-instruments/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/shipping-145-pdf-tools-in-a-week", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/shipping-145-pdf-tools-in-a-week", "title": "Shipping 145 PDF Tools in a Week", "summary": "How I built PDF Pony — 145 browser-based PDF tools — in under a week using Claude Code. The hardest part was not writing the code. It was understanding 145 different use cases well enough to make each tool genuinely useful.", "date_published": "2026-02-10T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/shipping-145-pdf-tools-in-a-week/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/from-political-maps-to-101-gis-tools", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/from-political-maps-to-101-gis-tools", "title": "From Political Maps to 101 GIS Tools", "summary": "How a decade of building interactive electoral maps — poll-by-poll riding visualizations, geospatial heritage databases, and geophysics mapping applications — led to GIS Tools, a free browser-based platform with 101 geospatial utilities.", "date_published": "2026-02-08T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/from-political-maps-to-101-gis-tools/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/browser-based-gis-replacing-desktop-software", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/browser-based-gis-replacing-desktop-software", "title": "Browser-Based GIS Is Replacing Desktop Software for Most Tasks", "summary": "QGIS and ArcGIS are powerful — but for format conversion, spatial analysis, coordinate reprojection, and thematic mapping, the browser can do the work without the installation. Here is what changed.", "date_published": "2026-02-06T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/browser-based-gis-replacing-desktop-software/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/vibe-coding-161-tools-in-an-afternoon", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/vibe-coding-161-tools-in-an-afternoon", "title": "Vibe Coding 161 Tools in an Afternoon", "summary": "I built MyText — 161 browser-based text manipulation tools — in an afternoon using vibe coding with Claude Code in YOLO mode. The interesting part was not the code. It was discovering that the bottleneck for shipping software has permanently shifted.", "date_published": "2026-02-06T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/vibe-coding-161-tools-in-an-afternoon/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-media-intelligence-platform", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-media-intelligence-platform", "title": "Building a Media Intelligence Platform from Scratch", "summary": "Twenty years of political media work taught me what communications teams actually need — and that nobody was building it. So I built Flashbulb: custom hardware, AI analysis, and real-time alerts across dozens of legislatures and broadcast channels.", "date_published": "2026-02-05T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "Media" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/building-media-intelligence-platform/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/every-developer-pastes-secrets-into-websites", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/every-developer-pastes-secrets-into-websites", "title": "Every Developer Pastes Secrets Into Websites They Don't Trust", "summary": "Developers routinely paste JWT tokens, API keys, JSON configs, and source code into random online tools. It is a universal security blind spot. I built MyText to eliminate it.", "date_published": "2026-02-05T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "Security" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/every-developer-pastes-secrets-into-websites/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-120-image-tools-for-the-browser", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-120-image-tools-for-the-browser", "title": "Building 120 Image Tools for the Browser", "summary": "How I built ImageNurse — 120 browser-based image tools spanning format conversion, batch processing, social media presets, AI background removal, and compression — using Canvas API, WebAssembly, and Claude Code.", "date_published": "2026-02-04T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/building-120-image-tools-for-the-browser/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/why-image-tools-should-not-need-an-account", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/why-image-tools-should-not-need-an-account", "title": "Why Image Tools Should Not Need an Account", "summary": "Online image tools like Canva, Adobe Express, and Photopea require accounts to process your images. They do not need to. The browser can handle conversion, compression, cropping, and batch processing without uploading a single file.", "date_published": "2026-02-02T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "Security" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/why-image-tools-should-not-need-an-account/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-357-financial-calculators", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-357-financial-calculators", "title": "Building 357 Financial Calculators Without Selling You Anything", "summary": "Every major financial calculator site exists to sell you a financial product. I built Calculators.money — 357 calculators, 444-term glossary, four-country tax coverage — because financial literacy tools should not come with an agenda.", "date_published": "2026-01-30T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/building-357-financial-calculators/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/from-protein-folding-to-polling-data", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/from-protein-folding-to-polling-data", "title": "From Protein Folding to Polling Data", "summary": "I studied biochemistry and bioinformatics at Queen's University, then spent years in political communications where I was often the only person in the room who understood a margin of error. Statistics Tools is the product of both worlds.", "date_published": "2026-01-28T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/from-protein-folding-to-polling-data/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/political-communications-digital-age", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/political-communications-digital-age", "title": "Political Communications in the Digital Age", "summary": "Twenty years of political communications — from co-founding the Blogging Tories to building data infrastructure for campaigns. How I watched the gatekeepers lose control and built the tools to operate in the environment that replaced them.", "date_published": "2026-01-28T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Politics", "Strategy" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/political-communications-digital-age/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/websites-should-be-useful-again", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/websites-should-be-useful-again", "title": "Websites Should Be Useful Again", "summary": "The web used to be full of independent sites that existed to be useful. Now it is dominated by platforms that exist to extract value. I am building the kind of websites I grew up loving — deep, useful, independent — and AI is what makes it possible again.", "date_published": "2026-01-26T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/websites-should-be-useful-again/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/finance-apps-are-not-financial-education", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/finance-apps-are-not-financial-education", "title": "Finance Apps Are Not Financial Education", "summary": "Robinhood, WealthSimple, and TikTok finfluencers have brought millions of young people into investing. They have not brought them financial education. The gap between access and understanding is where people get hurt.", "date_published": "2026-01-24T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "Software", "AI" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/finance-apps-are-not-financial-education/hero.png" }, { "id": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/multi-agent-ai-systems-practical-guide", "url": "https://stephentaylor.com/posts/multi-agent-ai-systems-practical-guide", "title": "Multi-Agent AI Systems: A Practical Guide to Orchestration", "summary": "How to design multi-agent AI systems that handle complex business workflows — architecture patterns, context management, and the orchestration layers that make them reliable in production.", "date_published": "2026-01-15T00:00:00.000Z", "tags": [ "AI", "Software" ], "authors": [ { "name": "Stephen Taylor" } ], "image": "https://stephentaylor-com-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/images/multi-agent-ai-systems-practical-guide/hero.png" } ] }