Scrappy, reliable software development and design.
Services
Data visualization
With years over twelve years of experience in D3, we can make you effective tools for understanding and communicating your data or processes.
Web services
We've been making services (programs that respond to http requests) for over a dozen years, at large commercial scales and at low-resource just-what-you-need scales. We work both with traditional and serverless platforms.
Prototyping
We believe that starting rough and iterating makes yields a strong product. This process often starts with prototyping. With a diverse set of techiniques at our disposal, we can start you on your path to finding out what works for your users.
Web audio
There is a full-featured sound synthesis platform built into everyone's browser. We can help you deliver the audio experience you want to get out there.
ETL
Finding and taking data, changing it, and putting it somewhere else: We've done this for small and big companies alike.
Natural language processing
We have extensive experience with tools for parsing and classifying sentences and words programmatically.
Scraping, automation, and testing
Extensive experience with headless browsers, particularly Playwright and Puppeteer, automating processes, and testing. We're still into test-driven development, even though its heyday is well past.
Electron apps and browser extensions
Browser-adjacent technologies are also in our purview.
Email: gcw@fastmail.com
Projects
Sentence ETL pipelines
Currently, we're building pipelines that extract sentences that demonstrate how a word is used from three sources: books, Wiktionary, and the New York Times. The pipelines ultimately take the sentences into Wordnik, the world's biggest English online dictionary. They run in JavaScript and Python AWS Lambdas.
Graphics generator
For Climate Central, we modified an engine used to generate per-location weather graphics so that it would no longer require JavaScript changes to create new kinds of graphics. Users could then create new graphics by creating graphic templates with Vega specifications. The renderer would grab per-location data to fill in templates and produce images like this warming trends graph.
Screenshot service
Also for Climate Central, we built a screenshot service that rendered web pages to images using Playwright and Docker running on AWS ECS.
An interactive explanation of quadtrees
This is a popular go-at-your-own-pace explanation of how the quadtree algorithm works to make large sets of points searchable.
The Sound of the Far Future
To convey the sense of scale of the dates that appear in scientific predictions about the far future, we built an audiovisual experience that that walks you through the timeline.