Stephen Taylor builds at the intersection of political strategy, software engineering, and media intelligence. Senior political adviser, full-stack developer, and AI integration specialist.https://stephentaylor.com/en-cahttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/analyzing-a-provincial-budget-in-thirty-minutes/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTAIStrategyhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-heritage-guide-technical-deep-dive/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-heritage-guide-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.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/heritage-guide-communications-strategy/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/heritage-guide-communications-strategy/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.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTStrategyAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/saving-canadas-heritage-register/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/saving-canadas-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.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/why-pdf-tools-should-not-upload-your-files/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareSecurityhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-software-for-scientific-instruments/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwarehttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/shipping-145-pdf-tools-in-a-week/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/from-political-maps-to-101-gis-tools/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/browser-based-gis-replacing-desktop-software/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/browser-based-gis-replacing-desktop-software/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.Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwarehttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/vibe-coding-161-tools-in-an-afternoon/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-media-intelligence-platform/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-media-intelligence-platform/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.Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareMediahttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/every-developer-pastes-secrets-into-websites/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/every-developer-pastes-secrets-into-websites/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.Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareSecurityhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-120-image-tools-for-the-browser/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/why-image-tools-should-not-need-an-account/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareSecurityhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-357-financial-calculators/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/building-357-financial-calculators/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.Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/from-protein-folding-to-polling-data/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/political-communications-digital-age/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/political-communications-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.Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTPoliticsStrategyhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/websites-should-be-useful-again/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/finance-apps-are-not-financial-education/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/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.Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTSoftwareAIhttps://stephentaylor.com/posts/multi-agent-ai-systems-practical-guide/https://stephentaylor.com/posts/multi-agent-ai-systems-practical-guide/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.Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMTAISoftware