Sandbox::https://another.rodeo

The Clyde

This time it's a relatively modern klunker/cruiser finding its way home -- an early 2000s Trek Clyde

Bikes 1 May 2026

The Artisanal Web

Craft, humanity, and our new robot overlords.

Writing 7 March 2026

About this site

We're doing it live! Whatever this site becomes, we're gonna build it out in the open so everybody can see all the half-baked ideas and dead ends.

Web Things 4 March 2026

Shop Notes

3D printing a trailer hitch cover

1 May 2026

Designing and printing a bike mirror

27 February 2026

Leather keyfob cover

5 February 2026

A leather toolroll

5 February 2026

Older Rodeos

Feedback doesn't scale

Listening is always hard, and it only gets harder at scale.

Writing 19 November 2025

Thermostats

Tuning team temperature

Writing 15 November 2025

Meet my new (to me) project truck: A 2000 Toyota 4Runner

Restoring an old 4Runner: rugged, analog, and built to last.

Vehicles 24 September 2025

Failure to communicate

The Four Levels of Remote Communication, or Why Your Team Forgets Everything

Writing 1 September 2025

This is where it all breaks

AI, service design, and the real work ahead

Writing 30 May 2025

Building DSCovery

How I built DSCovery, the civic tech jobs aggregator, and lessons learned.

Web Things 18 November 2024

Backpacks

How are you carrying your load?

Writing 15 November 2024

Skipped teeth and blockchains

Down a different blockchain rabbit hole.

Writing 24 October 2024

Engineering velocity: Part 2

Your team seems slower... Here's what to do about it.

Writing 22 October 2024

Engineering velocity

Why is my engineering team so much slower than they used to be?

Writing 17 October 2024

Road King

Bringing a 1948 cruiser bicycle into the 21st century.

Bikes 16 October 2024

Another one?

Another bedraggled classic cruiser finds its way to my house.

Bikes 16 October 2024

Tasks

Herculean tasks, Sisyphean tasks, what else have ya got?

Writing 4 September 2024

Trek 2100

What? A carbon fiber bike? In this house? Well, sort of...

Bikes 18 July 2024

DSCovery

Building an aggregator for jobs in civic tech.

Web Things 1 July 2024

We’ve got to make the damn websites work

Is it the most transformative thing we can do on the web in 2024?

Writing 16 April 2024

On values

What we care about costs us.

Writing 8 April 2024

The handcycle

An interesting journey into making bicycling more accessible.

Bikes 28 March 2024

11ty Linkrolls

How to build an old-fashioned linkroll for the 11ty static site generator.

Web Things 13 March 2024

AI is boring and stupid and maybe that's OK

Sometimes boring and stupid is still really useful.

Writing 11 March 2024

So you don't want to be a manager

Straight talk to a senior engineer wanting to stay on an IC track.

Writing 7 March 2024

Know your (documentation) audience

Why nobody likes your docs and your Single Source of Truth isn't working

Writing 1 March 2024

Quicksand meetings

Managers: Avoid these sinking meetings so your teams don't feel stuck.

Writing 19 February 2024

The Five Conditions for (Organizational) Improvement

Understanding why organizations get stuck and won't change

Writing 19 February 2024

Deploying

A running list of the questions I have to remember to ask myself when deploying a new app to a new environment.

Web Things 13 February 2024

Markitup (v2)

Bringing an old favorite jQuery library into the modern era. And some musings on ChatGPT.

Web Things 8 February 2024

Not funny, Dad

The end result of a fascination with obscure government data sources and dad jokes.

Web Things 27 January 2024

Pear

Comparing text from two documents easily, with no sign-up or data sharing.

Web Things 10 January 2024

The giant list of questions to ask employers

Do you get sytmied when you're asked if you have any questions in an inteview? Have we got a list for you.

Web Things 7 January 2024

The Luxus folding bike restoration

For some inexplicable reason, I wanted a vintage folding bike.

Bikes 16 September 2023

Maturity Model Generator

Need a maturity model? Just enjoy a silly joke? Either way, we've got you covered.

Web Things 8 August 2023

The electric Schwinn

My e-bike conversion on a 50-year-old Schwinn.

Bikes 2 March 2023

Making wine cork handlebar plugs

Want something different for your handlebars? How about a wine cork bar end? They're easy to make.

22 February 2023

Trek 520

A great bike, with a few caveats

Bikes 18 July 2022

Peugeot mixte restoration

Parlez-vous français?

Bikes 23 July 2021

Making a smart vintage camper

My attempt to bring modern tech to a very old camper.

Vehicles 7 May 2021

The bedraggled Raleigh

A bound-for-the-dumpster Raleigh Sports gets a new lease on life.

Bikes 23 August 2020

1971 Eco fiberglass camper restoration

Trying to put an egg (camper) back together again.

Vehicles 7 January 2020

Not My Rodeo^*

* But I like it

Worse on Purpose | How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality | Worse on Purpose

Investigative essays on corporate enshittification — how the brands you trusted made everything worse on purpose, and who profits when they do.

My LLM coding workflow going into 2026 - by Addy Osmani

Best practices for staying in control while coding with AI

You Can't Handle The Truth! - Matt Schouten

If your company can't respond to big red warning flags or to basic, clear feedback about the world, try building better feedback systems.

Sense Atlas (WIP)

Sense Atlas is an organizational cartography kit. It helps you collaborate to build maps of projects, policies, and organizational knowledge, to support situation awareness and comprehension among people working together to achieve common goals.

OBD-Pi : 7 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables

OBD-Pi: In this instructable you will learn how to connect your Raspberry Pi to a Bluetooth OBD-II adapter and display realtime engine data to your cars aftermarket head unit!

Crossing the Chasm… Inside Your Organisation

After watching countless strategies get lost in translation between the C-suite and the teams actually doing the work, I realised something: communicating strategy inside an organisation follows exactly the same rules as Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm.

Asymmetric Workloads: One Way Leaders Can Poison Their Culture | by Matt Schellhas | Oct 2021 | Medium

Leaders are force multipliers for a team. Bad leaders are fractional multipliers, spending little time and effort to cost their teams even more.

Work Simplification | Standards

A Priceless Story

A 'Cow On Ice' Teaches Us A Lesson In Culture And Business

A failure to connect culturally can have a devastating impact on the corporate bottom line.

Ensuring Effective and Timely Usability Research | OMB | The White House

It's taken years to make this happen, but gov offices can now easily conduct actual user testing to improve services.

Enhancing the customer-centricity of GSA websites – Digital.gov

An overview of GSA’s website evaluation process, which combines qualitative and quantitative data to assess website management and performance.

Asynchronous Work Is Hugely Misunderstood — Remote Work Prep

What if I told you there was a work approach that allowed you to have fewer meetings, solved your time zone issues, and allowed you to get more done uninterrupted? This is the magic of asynchronous work.

The Tech Talent Toolkit: How to attract and nurture a digital team in government | by U.S. Digital Response | Aug, 2024 | Medium

By using USDR’s Talent Toolkit, you can better hire and retain top tech talent within your government team, even when they’ve joined from outside government. By: Keith Wilson Let’s be honest: hiring…

Stop Trying to Follow Your Passion

“Follow your passion” is Latin for “Prepare to be exploited.”

Delivering healthy public services

Overcoming the gap between "delivery" and service impact.