innovation
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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
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Designing for delegation
Agentic, delegation-based services could reshape how people access government, cutting administrative burden – if agencies start building the right design patterns now. Continue reading
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AI instructions as platform infrastructure
Software delivery platforms provide reusable building blocks that reduce complexity. AI accelerates custom software development. The next evolution? Treating AI coding agent instructions as core platform infrastructure. Continue reading
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Revisiting an Old Idea: Building a Rules Engine with CouchDB
Recently, I decided to dust off this old project and give it the attention it deserves. Using CouchDB’to build a sophisticated, scalable, easily managed rules engine. Continue reading
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Searching For Patterns in Digital Modernization
We need to find new patterns to guide the work of digital service teams in government to lay the foundation for the next generation of public services Continue reading
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Two clear signs that you might be under-investing in your software delivery platform
As agencies use platforms to support these efforts, issues occasionally crop up. In this post, I talk about two common issues, what they mean, and how they can be fixed. Continue reading
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Parking Signs and Possible Futures for LLMs in Government
Government agencies adopting generative AI tools seems inevitable at this point. But there is more than one possible future for how agencies use generative AI to simplify complex government information. 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.
Civic Innovations 