Selected projects & work

EveryBlock

I co-founded EveryBlock with Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, and Dan X. O’Neil in 2007 in Chicago.

I developed the site along with Adrian, writing Python code for the Django-based application, administering the PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, writing JavaScript for various front-end elements including our OpenLayers-based custom maps (I wrote an article about our maps), including developing a custom nginx module to efficiently serve our map tiles.

Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail

I co-founded Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail in 2003, an all-volunteer non-profit organization that advocates for the conversion of an unused elevated rail line on the north side of Chicago to a multi-use greenspace and park. I designed and developed the FBT site, which is a Django app.

Election Day Advent Calendar

In 2006, my co-conspirator Ben Helphand and I, calling ourselves “Gerrymander” (slogan: Make Small Plans), conceived, designed (with help from Andrew Seay), produced, printed, and sold the Election Day Advent Calendar. Like a regular Advent calendar counts down the days ‘til Christmas, our political-nerd take on it counted down the days leading up to the 2006 midterm election. You opened a door each day and it would reveal a quote or fact about our democracy. This was an actual 11"×17", full-color, printed, die-cut calendar. We sold a fair number, more or less broke even, and declared it a success from our modest expectations. With design help from Melissa Dean, we repeated the effort in with a new calendar for the 2008 election.

Chris Hayes

I designed and developed another Django app in 2006, a personal site for my friend the journalist Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation and an MSNBC contributor.

Crain’s sites

As part of my freelance web developer career, I made a number of web apps for Crain’s Chicago Business, based around a news cycle and a data set. One example was Mayor Daley’s Contributions, which let you query a database of contributions made to the mayor in the run-up to the 2007 municipal elections. The contributions were also mapped. This was a Django app.

Civic Footprint

I created a site while at the Center for Neighborhood Technology in 2005 called the Civic Footprint. This was a site where you typed in your address, and it showed you who represented you politically, down to the local level (congressman, state senator, alderman, etc.), and a map of all your political geographies. This was an early Ruby on Rails site, and I hacked in geospatial support to ActiveRecord so that I could make queries against the PostGIS database containing the political boundaries. The maps were generated by MapServer.