James Desmond

Building 311monitor.com — real-time city service request alerts

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Resume

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Reducing Huge repo size with simple nginx fileserving

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 14:51:52 +0000

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.

Fun with VQGAN : Seeing what anything could look like

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 14:51:52 +0000

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.

How I screenshare a subsection of a 3400x1440 ultrawide monitor as a 1080p virtual webcam in Microsoft Teams

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 10:51:52 +0000

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.

Using a Blackberry Classic in 2021 with self-hosted services

Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I want to use a phone with a qwerty keyboard.

Cambridge Open311 Proximity

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 12:10:24 -0500

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.

Boston Open311 Proximity

Sun, 10 Jan 2021 12:10:24 -0500

What this does:

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

Project Gutenberg Unwrapper

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 12:10:24 -0500

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.

Corrlinks Text Split

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 12:10:24 -0500

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.

How I merge GoPro Telemetry data from split video files

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:51:52 +0000

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:

How I update this site

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 14:51:52 +0000

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.

How this site was made

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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

seeclickfix Organization IDs for Open311 api implementation

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 08:51:52 +0000

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