The idea that put us in that room belonged to a tech publisher named Tim O’Reilly, who in 2009 had a thought that sounded simple and was therefore radical: what if government were a platform?1 Not a vending machine that took your taxes and dispensed services, but data, tools, and APIs that anyone could build on, the way a generation of companies had been built on top of the web. Open the plumbing, he argued, and a thousand things nobody at City Hall had thought of would bloom on top of it. The idea spawned a book, a circuit of conferences, and eventually a nonprofit called Code for America.
Code for America started with a fellowship: take talented technologists, embed them in a city for a year, see what they build. It worked well enough that a question followed it around: what about everyone who wanted to do this but did not want to quit their job to do it? So in 2012, on the back of a $1.5 million grant from Google, Code for America launched the Brigades — local volunteer chapters for people who would give a few evenings a month to their community but were not going to leave their careers to work in government.2 One of the first chapters was in Boston.
At first we called it civic hacking. A TSA agent once asked me, suspicious, about my National Day of Civic Hacking sticker, “are you a hacker?” I had to explain it was not about breaking into corporate systems to steal data or demand ransom. It meant almost the opposite: finding a clever, usually unsanctioned way to solve a public problem without waiting for anyone’s permission.
The best example I know happened in February 2015, in the middle of one of the worst winters Boston has ever had. The MBTA had effectively stopped working. Code for America had an event that weekend called CodeAcross; in other cities it got cancelled for weather. Boston ran it anyway. Three coworkers from a company called Panorama Education had spent that whole miserable week texting each other about which trains were actually moving, because the official alerts were useless, and somewhere in there one of them — Geoffrey Litt — said the thing that turns a private annoyance into a public tool: what if everyone in Boston could do this together? They built it that weekend and called it MBTA Ninja. You opened the site, picked your line, and saw what other riders were reporting in real time: delays, a disabled train, a car so crowded you should just wait for the next one. You could confirm someone else’s report or wave the all-clear. A Waze for a transit system that had stopped telling people the truth. Within three days more than ten thousand people were using it, and it was routinely surfacing problems five and ten minutes before the T did. Nobody put a single new sensor on a single train. The sensors were the riders. The network was already there; MBTA Ninja just gave it somewhere to connect.
That’s the part of the story I love. Here’s the part the conference talks skipped: many things we built never fully landed. EnerSave was going to help Cambridge’s hundred biggest apartment buildings stop bleeding heat, chasing a five-million-dollar energy prize across hundreds of Tuesday nights; its repo was archived, read-only, in 2021. Cliff Effects shipped something real and good — a calculator so a Project Hope caseworker could show a client whether a raise would quietly cost her more in lost benefits than it paid — and it still runs today, known to almost no one. MyCity launched with the City of Boston, a press release, and trash days you could ask Alexa about; the city’s own digital lead later conceded that hardly anyone used it.
And MBTA Ninja? It worked. Then the MBTA learned to track its own trains — track circuits, a real-time API, countdown clocks on every platform — and the Ninja wasn’t needed anymore. That’s the rarest fate of all: not failure, but a success so complete the institution finally builds the thing itself, and the need you were filling quietly closes over you.
We changed the mantra to “build with, not for.” Instead of engineers parachuting in with an app nobody had asked for, the good projects started to come the other way — from a caseworker, a city department, a nonprofit that actually knew where the problem was. And once you’re working with someone instead of for them, the deliverable stops being the software. It becomes the relationship. A city agency gets to pilot a risky idea cheaply; its staff gets to watch modern software get made up close; and the next time, they call you before they write the RFP. You don’t ship trust. You earn it.
Which is how, one winter five years later, two strangers handed us a website.
In early 2021, Massachusetts had vaccines and no usable way to find them; the state’s own site would make you fill out a long form just to tell you, at the end, that the location was out. Two people, Zane Stiles and Kunal Shah, built the opposite of that on their own — a site called VaccinateMA that showed you where the doses actually were, up front. And then it worked, which turned out to be the problem. It got big. Big meant real people depending on it, and real people depending on it meant liability, and liability is a heavy thing to carry on a side project you started out of conscience. So they did the responsible thing: rather than carry it alone, they brought it to Code for Boston — and stayed on as founders of a team that could carry what two people no longer could. We kept it alive — eighteen volunteers phoning clinics every day to verify availability across four hundred and fifty locations, feeding what they found into a database powering our tool — straight through the months when an open appointment was the single most valuable piece of information in the Commonwealth. At its peak the site was taking six thousand hits an hour. There was a morning when the commonwealth’s own vaccine finder buckled and ours didn’t, and the reason was unglamorous: someone had spent two weeks moving the thing onto AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Sometimes someone with experience making good technical choices is the difference between success and failure.
Software for government was never new — agencies bought it by the truckload, mostly through fixed-spec contracts that shipped years late and wrong. What Code for America’s brigades carried in was a creed, codified by 18F and USDS: start with what people need, ship small and iterate in the open, put practitioners inside instead of outsourcing the thinking. So the scoreboard was never an app. It was people — volunteers who showed up to a Tuesday hack night and walked out building government. Code for DC’s Matt Bailey went from the brigade to the White House budget office. And it stuck where it was hardest to reverse: the forging of a new kind of vendor. Nava and Ad Hoc, founded by HealthCare.gov alumni, won prime contracts on the strength of having actually shipped, so when DOGE gutted 18F and USDS, the firms were still standing, still winning, still building in the open. You can watch the whole arc in one career — Harlan Weber, founder of Code for Boston, founding member of the Massachusetts Digital Service, now Director of Design, Strategy & Growth at Nava. The weeknight hobby became a career, then a state institution, then an industry.
So has the movement earned a victory lap?
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about victory laps: you can spend the whole race waiting for a finish line that was never there. There’s no app that fixes government. There’s no headline, no trophy, no afternoon when somebody with a title walks into the room and tells you that you were right. I waited for that day for years. It isn’t coming, and the reason it isn’t coming is the work does not end. But that does not mean we did not win.
Tim O’Reilly said government would become a platform. He was right. He just pointed one layer too low. It was never the data. It was never the APIs.
It was us.
So take the lap. We earned it.
Dr. Aure Schrock, A Decade of Code for America: Reflections from Five Years Ago. See also Tim O’Reilly, “Gov 2.0: It’s All About the Platform” (2009). ↩
Code for America used part of a $1.5 million grant from Google to launch the Brigade program in 2012. The inaugural class was 19 captains across 16 cities; the network grew to roughly 80 cities across the country. They ended the program in 2023. Many former brigades continue their work as chapters of the Alliance of Civic Technologists. ↩
We were trying to figure it out. Why is government so bad at technology? How might software make our cities better places to live? Why can’t GPS send bus location to my mobile phone? How can I find my towed car? What if instead of waiting for government we built the fix and open sourced it for the benefit of government? Surely if we just visualized it on a map using JavaScript we could solve these problems.
After I started attending these hack nights my first product epiphany arrived while browsing the City of Hartford’s Socrata Open Data portal. A city employee had dutifully started uploading towed car data to the portal on a nightly basis. After reading about a similar function the City of Boston provided I believed it’d be handier if one could get a text message when their car was towed. I had never built a web application before so I used a period of long unemployment to learn a framework and language called Ruby on Rails from a web course and integrate with a service called Twilio to text folks if their car appeared in Hartford’s database. I manifested everything Tim O’Reily preached in his Government 2.0 talks and belly flopped spectacularly. It turns out folks will not sign up for an app they do not know about. I needed marketing.
Lacking cash to advertise I found the opportunity to barter with Doug Hardy, the proprietor of a local news website, CTNewsJunkie.com. In exchange for website help and support Doug gave me ad space on his website. Meanwhile I started shopping the concept to some other municipalities in Connecticut. With all the naïveté of a man in their mid-20s I thought I could sell my service to towns and cities and create my own civic start-up. I am forever thankful to folks like Doug Hausladen and Ben Berkowitz who took time to meet with me and entertained my fanciful notions. I learned there is more to software than writing code.
In this era data was religion and code was salvation. Sites like FiveThirtyEight and TrendCT suggested we just needed to visualize our problems to fix them. A story of poverty is a tragedy but poverty mapped on a screen is an opportunity. A letter to the editor about potholes is useless, but a 311 app that adds GPS coordinates to pothole complaints is a public service. Millions of residents would indeed see, click, and fix.
I still thought there was something to this idea of civic volunteerism. My journey would bring me to the big leagues: Boston, Massachusetts. There a few years prior a man named Harlan started a revolutionary Code for America Brigade. Code for Boston, bolstered by a deep bench of technology talent, was already punching above its weight. If anyone could fix government, surely they could.
]]>It is important to compare wearing the Ray-Ban metas with regular glasses as an all day glasses wearer. While they do look like regular Wayfarer sunglasses they sit larger and bulkier than the “New Wayfarer” style that I have been used to wearing. When I switch back to my everyday Warby Parker glasses I find my face feeling a little bit of relief, even if I do not notice the weight while I’m wearing the Meta glasses. The prescription lens quality is optically fantastic as ordered direct from the Ray-Ban website. I do not think these are perfect as your only glasses but I find myself happy wearing them a lot more than I expected.
A big question with the cost of the frame being so high is whether it’s worth investing in Transitions lenses, or buying one or two pairs with clear and/or tinted lenses. I tried Transitions for the first time with these and have come away impressed. The latest generation changes tint quickly and in bright sunlight is sufficiently dark that I do not miss regular sunglasses. The only downside is the tint barely activates in cars due to their UV shielded glass. Allegedly the Xtractive line resolves this issue at the cost of maintaining a slight tint indoors, a trade off I did not want to make. The regular Transitions stay perfectly clear inside. I am happy with my choice here.
The camera is not amazing but it is good enough. Photos are usually clear at close and medium range, and Meta will smart crop them to account for the angle your head is at to make them look normal. Videos are a bit better than the photos. Even when you shake your head the stabilization of the video (presumably software based) is decent. Being able to quickly get first person perspective photos means you do not miss shots you might otherwise not take.
Meta AI is ironically the thing I find myself using the least. While the conversational aspect feels significantly more natural than speaking with Siri, Meta AI suffers from being disconnected. It cannot search the web for answers. There are no connections to have it interact with my smart home devices via HomeKit. It has a reminders system that is separate from the Apple app. The future will not arrive until Meta and Apple build bridges instead of walls between their ecosystems.
The stand out feature is the shockingly clear speakers. While audio is not as detailed as my AirPods Pro, it is more than sufficient for phone calls, gaming, and podcasts, and passable for casual music listening. It has been an incredible convenience to not have to take my AirPods Pro in and out of my ears while wearing these. While transparency mode for AirPods is nice, I feel less isolated from the world without AirPods in my ears. Less need to fumble with the AirPods means I find myself listening to podcasts in situations that I would normally go without. There is some sound leakage to the outside world, but its not noticeable at lower volume levels.
The achilles heel is the half-day battery life. If you leave the house for an extended period of time you will have to bring your charging case if you plan to use the smart features later in the day. You can continue using these as regular eyeglasses once the batteries die, but it defeats the point. Most people will not be satisfied with these as their only pair of eyeglasses. IPX4 water resistance means you should leave them home when riding water rides or swimming at the pool.
A few weeks with these has shown me that smart glasses will be a part of our future. Google recently announced a line of their smart glasses and Apple is allegedly developing their own pair due to be released in 2026. As better battery and further miniaturization of electronics arrives, more exciting frame options should follow. If you are an early adopter you will enjoy the Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses today, but we are a few years out from this product category truly maturing.
]]>This is feedback I got from an employee at a place I used to work when they left. The culture at this place was incredibly progressive. Filled with wonderful well meaning folks trying to marry their careers to their purpose. This person’s heart matched the mission of where they were, but the culture kept them from feeling included. A place where failing to master new lingo could be a micro-aggression and disagreeing with others could be a crises. In the 80s progressivism was punk rock — raw, accessible, and focused on empowering ordinary people. In 2024 it has become avant-garde jazz — technically sophisticated but focused on complex terminology and impressing insiders.
While progressives can stand to be kinder in their culture they can also stand to be more machiavellian in their politics. Bad faith claims around Obama’s birth, Kamala Harris’ race, and the integrity of elections proliferated against Democratic candidates. Our failure to master information warfare is knee-capped by an allergy to hyperbole. Meanwhile when holding power in Congress Democrats have been too trigger shy to eliminate the filibuster. We could not get our heads out of asses to expand the Supreme Court after Merrick Garland was denied a seat. We need a gentler heart in our community and a sharper edge in our tactics.
If Democrats want to fight they need to learn to land punches as well as they take them. Republican rhetoric manages to knock down Democrats while raising themselves up: “liberal crybaby” implies the target is dramatic and the critic is levelheaded. When progressives lob criticisms weird is a soft jab where stupid would be a strong blow. Trump has shown us the electorate does not see this kind of language as mean, but as authentic. We would be remiss to ignore this lesson.
The key is to punch up, not punch down. Instead of unleashing our sharpest knives on our family or neighbors we should save them for the politicians and billionaires that tell us our enemies are down the street instead of up in the penthouse. Save your patience for your colleague trying to navigate a changing world and save your fire for the con men that profit off of the fears and struggles of working Americans.
Democrats and progressives also came off in the past year as caring more about the Middle East than Middle America. Voters have limited time and attention. As heartbreaking as the situation in Gaza is, most folks do not see it as pressing as the issues here at home.1 Wasting oxygen on issues that divide us inevitably hurts our efforts, especially when we can unite behind causes that matter like ending hunger and homelessness.
The path forward requires both humility and boldness. Progressives must rebuild a movement that speaks to ordinary Americans in plain language about the issues that affect their daily lives. This means creating spaces where people can engage without fear of missteps, while still advancing justice and equality. It also means fighting harder and smarter, using the full range of political tools available to us when we are in power.
]]>Hardware security keys are small devices that plug into a computer or smart phone and provide a strong physical form of two-factor authentication. This technology is proven, and widely supported by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Unlike software based solutions they are virtually impervious to phishing attacks and remote hacking attempts. Yet despite their effectiveness companies resist using them due to perceived inconvenience or cost.
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office should begin investigating companies in critical sectors like healthcare and finance and inventory whether they use hardware security keys. Some gentle prodding might be sufficient to spur action by some, but others may require a more direct approach. Using their authority under 93A the Attorney General’s office should make clear that failing to secure sensitive data and systems with hardware security keys are an unfair or deceptive trade practice.
Next session the Massachusetts legislature should take this further by codifying the requirement that critical systems be protected with hardware security keys. The Commonwealth can lead by example with rules for its own systems, along with future software procurements. Extra penalties and enhanced damage awards should be codified for breaches that could have been prevented by hardware security keys but were not. These penalties should escalate annually so they grow from a nudge to a bludgeon over three years. Let us pass an audacious bill that puts hackers and scammers on notice that their era of easy money is over.
When seatbelts were first introduced, many viewed them as unnecessary. When airbags came along, they argued they were too costly. Today we cannot imagine driving a car without these life saving innovations. The free market is great at a lot of things, but mandating its own conscience is not one of them. It is past time for our state government to bridge the gap between the private sector’s innovation and its adoption of security technology.
]]>Understanding the methods and considerations that go into designing a well built home gives you insight into issues you might not have been able to previously articulate or see in your own home. As someone who bought a condo it also is nice to have a sense of what a forever home might have or look like compared to what is available on the market. Finally the fact that so few of these ideas in the book match what is happening with renovations around my neighborhood makes me question how much thought the local builders have put into these issues.
One thing that stood is out is the authors of the book hate plastic products. Although better than it was, vinyl siding will never look as good as wood or fiber board to me. However I will disagree with them on the use of things like Trex, which uses recycled plastic and is less maintenance than a straight wood deck.
It seems odd that the security industry and its approach to protecting users and its data is not under scrutiny after the Crowdstrike incident. The no blame postmortem has wilted into a no accountability box checking exercise. The amount of security hoops to jump through seems to grow every year, but so do the number of breaches. We cannot keep paying more for failure.
Whole classes of security software duplicate functionality provided by other software or hook in to monitor it. If Windows and MacOS have built-in anti-malware tools, why does your browser also need that? Is Crowdstrike really going to be better at identifying threats than Microsoft? If you’re going to deploy restrictions on software users can install, what level of scrutiny is sufficient for approval? Did you read the source code? Did you read the source code for the dependent libraries? In a zero trust environment should a browser extension really be a threatening attack vector?
When corporations buy automobiles, they do not buy special versions that have different locks and immobilizers than what the general public buys. Yet for some reason folks think corporations need special versions of software to be secure. The fact that Google touts a secure version of Chrome implies that the regular version is not secure. Yet there is no special reason they could not simply integrate the secure settings and features into their main version.
]]>Galloway’s sobering advice comes off as a bit contrarian to the kinds of things you might hear in a college graduation speech. Where folks might advise “follow your passion” Galloway makes a case for trying to accumulate the wealth you need to live the life you want to live. If starving artist does not suit you, Galloway’s advice might resonate.
When I was younger my father kept telling me to put money into an IRA. Even when I was not making much and found it to be a stretch. Dad knew, just as Galloway points out, that it’s good to get into the habit of saving. Combined with the magic of compound interest, you have a foundation for a financially secure future.
Galloway spends some detours ruminating on his decision to buy and maintain a private jet. This isn’t a normal person problem, but through it he explains that it is worth buying your time back. You can always make more money, but everyone gets the same 24 hours in the day. Do not waste it sitting in lines if you do not have to.
]]>If you want to do some one off convenience scripting on iPadOS Apple Shortcuts bridges the gap between the more simple operating system and some of the advanced things software engineers would want to do. Shortcuts gives you a way to automate the boring stuff.