General Discussion
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The Lesson of Direct File
The Direct File project may have been terminated, but its legacy lives on in lessons for the future of Civic Tech and how it can help improve government services. Continue reading
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Civic Tech’s Interface Era, Revisited
A prior post on The End of Civic Tech’s Interface Era gets revisited with the launch of America.gov. What did the original post get right, and wrong. Continue reading
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It’s The End of Agile (As We Know It)
AI is changing the way government teams will practice agile. Are agencies ready for the change? Continue reading
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The Collapsing Cost of Software Development
The cost of generating software code is collapsing. AI coding tools have matured faster than most realize. For governments, this changes everything. Continue reading
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Disposable Software and the Future of Government Technology
AI is driving a toward “disposable software” and this could have significant implications for the public sector. The SpecOps method offers one way for governments to adapt to this potential change. Continue reading
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AI-Powered Automation: Taking ATO Modernization Beyond the Bottleneck
Strategic use of AI tools can support efforts to automate the ATO process and dramatically reduce the time to authorize new technology systems. Continue reading
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Three Projects I’m Proud of in 2025
In 2025, I built a lot of things to help me understand the changes that are happening and the things we need to focus on going forward to make government work better. Here are three I am most proud of. Continue reading
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What Does a Good Spec File Look Like?
I’ve been thinking a lot about spec-driven development lately and that got me thinking: what does a good spec file actually look like? How do we know when it’s good? The answer – it depends. Continue reading
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Proving Out a New Approach to Legacy System Modernization
Government legacy systems hold decades of institutional knowledge that disappears when we focus only on translating old code to new code. I’ve been developing SpecOps—a methodology that uses AI to extract that knowledge into plain-language specifications that policy experts can actually verify. Continue reading
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Infrastructure as Code for AI: The Rapid Evolution of Agent Instructions
AI coding agent instructions have evolved from simple markdown files to sophisticated orchestration frameworks in months, not years. For government, this rapid maturation offers new opportunities for collaboration that traditional code sharing never achieved. Continue reading
About Me
I am the former Chief Data Officer for the City of Philadelphia. I also served as Director of Government Relations at Code for America, and as Director of the State of Delaware’s Government Information Center. For about six years, I served in the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), and helped pioneer their work with state and local governments. I also led platform evangelism efforts for TTS’ cloud platform, which supports over 30 critical federal agency systems.
