Code

After a long hiatus from when I first wrote web apps using the now almost defunct Cold Fusion platform, I got back into coding a few years ago with Python. My code is still pretty damn ugly, at least at first, but I love building and creating things that work. I’m much more of a plumbing guy when it comes to data architecture; you won’t find me building attractive, fancy, whiz-bang web apps. I think most about what happens with data over the long sweep of time.

Partly because of my government career, I’ve developed a real passion for getting high quality, usable data into the public domain in forms and structures that let anyone anywhere build trustworthy applications. I’m constantly running into cases where the information available to the average person is just not very accessible and reusable from its original form. Lately, I’m pushing on what we can do with Wikidata and other aspects of the “Global Knowledge Commons.”

Also from my experience, even in some fairly well-funded organizations and circumstances, I tend to keep an eye on the relative longevity (and lack thereof) of the average data amalgamation efforts. It’s gotten a lot easier, and to some extent cheaper, to spin up infrastructure online in one or another commercial cloud platform. I’ve gotten to be a big fan of Digital Ocean’s offerings as one of the most accessible and cost effective in the space.

However, desiging lasting, sustainable architecture is hard work. Code rot, even for real software engineers, sets in quicker than we’d like to think. One of the things I’m always looking for is some way to leverage someone else’s investment in infrastructure that has proven some degree of longevity. With all of the interesting tech and design patterns that have developed in the last decade of cloud-based developments, we can now focus on small little bits of code run as “serverless” functions that do lots of interesting work in slinging data around. When architected and organized well, those become much more maintainable components that have a better chance of being kept up to date.

You’ll find the majority of my code on GitHub.

Note: There is a mix of repos under my personal account that include some stuff I’ve done officially as part of my job. That stuff will be marked in the README with an official disclaimer. Everything else is my own work.