Software Projects

Some of this is current, some of it is finished, and one of them is the thing I actually think about.

What I’m building now

shrbl — An operating system in which no program starts out able to do anything. The premise is that ambient authority is the root of most of what’s wrong with the security model everything runs on today: a process gets the rights of the user who started it, and then spends its life with far more power than it needs. Your text editor can read your SSH keys. Nothing about editing text requires that.

Capabilities invert it. A program can only touch what it has been handed a reference to, so opening a file grants access to that file and to nothing else, and the clipboard is passed to an application for the duration of a launch rather than sitting there permanently readable. The interesting problem is making that livable rather than merely correct, which is why it isn’t a paper: it boots, you log in, and you get a desktop with a launcher, a file manager, a settings app and a window manager, all of it driveable entirely from the keyboard. In progress, and likely to stay that way.

Live

MyRepTracker — Find out what your representatives are actually doing. It follows bills, legislators, committees, votes and elections across all fifty states; you tell it what you care about and it emails you when something moves. You can also just ask it questions about a bill in plain language, which is faster than reading forty pages of amendment text to find out whether the thing you object to survived committee.

ArsAstro — Cast and read a chart in the traditional and Vedic systems. Divisional charts, ashtakavarga, avastha, aspects and bhava analysis, the yogas, and the dasha periods that tell you when something is supposed to happen rather than merely what. Most of the work went into getting the classical rules right; the astronomy underneath is the part that’s already settled.

StudyHoot — Get through a book and find out whether you actually took it in. It summarises, pulls out the themes, and sets quiz questions that come with the reasoning behind the right answer, not just the right answer, which is the difference between checking a box and learning something.

FutbolHawk — Follow a football season properly. Fixtures, results, lineups, events, referees and standings across leagues, seasons and cup rounds, with a news feed filtered down to the teams and competitions you follow rather than everything.

Two things it does that most sites don’t. It plays out the rest of the season thousands of times over to work out who is actually going to win the league, and it keeps the answer from every previous week, so you can watch a title race turn instead of just seeing today’s number. And it carries a set of Fantasy Premier League tools — who to captain, who to transfer in, who’s good value, who’s differential enough to be worth the risk, and who’s carrying a knock — plus a prediction game that scores your calls as the results come in.

Other things I’ve built

An ad platform. Everything needed to sell and serve your own advertising: advertisers book campaigns priced by impression, by click, or at a flat fee; the auction decides what runs; and targeting narrows it by location, time of day, device, language and interest. It caps how often any one person sees the same ad, paces spend so a daily budget lasts the whole day instead of being gone by ten in the morning, runs A/B tests between creatives, and falls back to something sensible when nothing qualifies. There’s a console on top for running it all.

Motlii — A content management system for people who run more than one site. Several sites, one place to manage them, and a drag-and-drop page builder so that whoever actually writes the copy can lay out a page without needing a developer.

Magnodata — A consumer research platform for studies where people answer on video. It transcribes every response, reads sentiment, pulls out the attributes people mention, and then lets you search the whole panel in plain language and generates the report at the end, which turns a pile of unwatched footage into something you can answer questions from. It grew out of two earlier attempts at the same problem, both still around.

Elsewhere

Client and agency work is at JustClassic Consulting.