Proof

The receipts, running live

Small apps against publicly available problems, built on personal time to prove the patterns I write about hold up in production. The same discipline goes into the client work: find the decision, surface the constraint, ship the system.

Work with me Read the writing

By the numbers

42newsletter issues shipped 5apps shipped on personal time 29macro indicators tracked daily 100%data-validation pass rate

Shipped

Screenshot of the High School Pathways planner showing credits earned, gen-ed coverage, and a savings calculator

Ogden School District’s degree-requirement PDF rebuilt as a living visual roadmap. Parents see credits earned, gaps to close, and the next decision they need to make.

What shipped

Static dashboard that translates a dense policy PDF into a status bar + course timeline
No login, no tracking — designed for a parent on a phone at the kitchen table
Same lens used in the consulting work: find the moment of decision, surface the constraint, make the next step obvious

Screenshot of the Economic Dashboard showing cycle-signal charts with recession bands and a yield-curve read

Live macro indicators from FRED — Buffett indicator, yield curve, employment, housing — with a running notebook of what each move means. Refreshed weekdays by a GitHub Action.

What shipped

FRED data pipeline: every indicator pulled, validated, and committed every weekday — runs in this repo
Dashboard with reference zones, date presets, and a raw/relative toggle

Screenshot of What the roles pay showing data-role base-salary panels and methodology callout

Data-role salary panels from ai-jobs.net postings: base salary only, USD, global, with role classification, per-role outlier trim, sample-size gates, and explicit methodology notes.

What shipped

ai-jobs.net pipeline adapted into this repo: fetch, classify, trim, aggregate, and publish static data
Recharts dashboard for postings, median base trends, recent distributions, experience levels, remote share, country comparison, and summary table
Methodology guardrail: base salary from ai-jobs.net is kept separate from levels.fyi total compensation

Screenshot of the Browser GIF and Meme Maker tool for captioning images and converting screen recordings into platform-sized GIFs

A browser-native meme and GIF maker: place any number of Impact captions on a photo, add a caption bar above it, or convert a short screen recording (or several, stitched into one) with trim, boomerang playback, filters, and target-size compression — without sending source files to a server.

What shipped

React island mounted inside Astro so the heavy ffmpeg workflow only loads on the tool page
Client-side conversion with file picker, drag-and-drop, clipboard paste, preview, and download
Platform-aware target-size mode that retries with lower width, FPS, and palette size when needed
A still-image path that skips ffmpeg entirely — canvas straight to PNG, so photo memes export instantly
Caption geometry as a tested pure module, sized in fractions of the frame so text holds its weight at any export size
Free-placement caption layers with drag-to-position, and keyboard nudging so every layer stays reachable without a pointer
Panel templates (two-panel reaction, before/after, 2x2, escalating list) shipped as zone layouts over the user’s own pictures — no third-party meme images hosted
Clip stitching: drop several screen recordings, GIFs and stills, trim or hold each one, and ffmpeg joins them into one movie (identical segment encodes, joined without a second encode) that the GIF path renders like any other video

Screenshot of the Ogden Home Finder with housing stats and a map of listings

A living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing. Every morning an AI agent scrapes 2BR rentals and for-sale homes; code merges them into a price-tracked catalogue; a gate refuses any run that looks like corruption before it ships. The pipeline’s anatomy is in The Scrape Gate.

What shipped

Daily scrape on GitHub Actions from a fresh clone: the agent runs two deterministic scrapers (rent.com, Redfin) over a 10-mile circle, and every map pin is the one the listing site sends
A merge script that owns the keys, the append-only price history, and each listing’s active → missing → removed lifecycle
A pre-push validation gate (deleted listings, rewritten history, a >15% active-count drop, new duplicate keys), also run in CI and replayed over every scrape since June
Static page with stats, a map, a sortable table and per-listing price sparklines; Rent / Buy toggle over two catalogues

The receipts, in depth

Two standing records back this up: the validation evidence —29 series checked against source every weekday — and the build log, the full shipping cadence newest-first. If you’d rather not wait for the next entry,the writing is where the work-in-progress shows up first.

Validation evidence Build log