Posts
Thinking on strategy, technology, and the intersection of public affairs and software.
March 26, 2026 · 10 min read
Analyzing a Provincial Budget in Thirty Minutes
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.
February 11, 2026 · 12 min read
Building Heritage Guide: A Technical Deep Dive
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.
February 11, 2026 · 6 min read
Getting Heritage Guide Noticed: SEO, AI Outreach, and a National Campaign
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.
February 11, 2026 · 8 min read
Saving Canada's Heritage Register
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.
February 11, 2026 · 4 min read
Why PDF Tools Should Not Upload Your Files
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.
February 9, 2026 · 5 min read
Building Software for Scientific Instruments
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.
February 9, 2026 · 4 min read
Shipping 145 PDF Tools in a Week
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.
February 7, 2026 · 4 min read
From Political Maps to 101 GIS Tools
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.
February 5, 2026 · 4 min read
Browser-Based GIS Is Replacing Desktop Software for Most Tasks
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.
February 5, 2026 · 4 min read
Vibe Coding 161 Tools in an Afternoon
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.
February 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Building a Media Intelligence Platform from Scratch
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.
February 4, 2026 · 3 min read
Every Developer Pastes Secrets Into Websites They Don't Trust
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.
February 3, 2026 · 4 min read
Building 120 Image Tools for the Browser
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.
February 1, 2026 · 3 min read
Why Image Tools Should Not Need an Account
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.
January 29, 2026 · 4 min read
Building 357 Financial Calculators Without Selling You Anything
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.
January 27, 2026 · 4 min read
From Protein Folding to Polling Data
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.
January 27, 2026 · 9 min read
Political Communications in the Digital Age
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.
January 25, 2026 · 4 min read
Websites Should Be Useful Again
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.
January 23, 2026 · 4 min read
Finance Apps Are Not Financial Education
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.
January 14, 2026 · 3 min read
Multi-Agent AI Systems: A Practical Guide to Orchestration
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.