James Desmond

If you have been following this blog you might have noticed a theme — I have a few posts about Open311 APIs and tools I have built around them. 311monitor.com is the latest and most ambitious of those projects: a real-time alerting platform that watches 311 service requests across 13 US cities and notifies you when something matches your rules. I built it over a weekend (March 14-15) using Claude Code, going from zero to a production deployment with 894 tests and 97% code coverage.

Senior Software Engineer building scalable cloud platforms and driving technical standards across enterprise organizations.
github.com/jamesdesmond | linkedin.com/in/james-desmond/ | Download PDF

The problem I faced with my current deployment of this website, was that my last post bloated the size of my git repo with large binary files.

I installed VQGAN on Windows. All I had to do was install Python 3.9 and miniconda for Python 3.9 I made some funny looking images using it, and am hoping to pursue this further.

Situation: you are in a meeting, sharing your screen. You use a ultrawide monitor, everyone else on your team uses laptops. You share your entire window and everyone needs to bring out the magnifying glasses. Teams will let you share just a single application, but that is not enough for most screensharing use cases. You want multiple applications to be shared, and just a 1080p sized frame to be shared from your monitor. This guide will accomplish just that.

I want to use a phone with a qwerty keyboard.

What this does:

Cambridge See Click Fix is an online 311 repository for citizen based 311 complaints. See Click Fix maintains an api following the Open311 standard.

What this does:

BOS:311 is an online 311 repository for citizen based 311 complaints. BOS:311 utilizes the Open311 standard.

What this does:

Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks.

These eBooks are able to be downloaded in many formats, in .txt format the books are formatted to wrap at around 80 char.

The script unwraps those needless wraps and returns the properly formatted version.

What this does:

Corrlinks is a privately owned company that operates the Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System (TRULINCS), the email system used by the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons to allow inmates to communicate with the outside world.

It charges $0.25 for each email sent by a person on the outside, or inside. There is both a character and line count cap on messages that can be sent.

From the GoPro Hero 5 and up, the camera records telemetry data (gps coord, speed, g-force) while recording video. This data is nice to have and allows for cool overlays like this:

In my last post I described how the server was set up for this very site itself. In this post, I will be describing how I create new content for the site from client devices.

This site was created with a few main goals in mind:

• Being easy to update from any device which I own
• Cheap to host, without reliance on ‘free’ services
• Stable, with ease of updating and upgrading
• Storing my writing in a domain which I own and control
• Allowing me to learn more about linux server management through practice
• Easy, simple backups

Full listing of all organization IDs for the seeclickfix Open311 api.