John Spencer Terry

This project was an opportunity to experiment with LangChain and LangGraph by building a grounded Q&A tool over clinical guidelines. It uses guardrails, retrieval,...

I use the Brooklyn Public Library a lot. When you request an item and it becomes available, it gets pulled and held on a...

An LLM call doesn’t always return the same output twice, so you can’t assert on specific outputs like in traditional software testing. As a...

Before a workflow gets built, someone has to decide it’s worth building. This is a look at a short, structured intake for that decision,...

Copy-pasting a skill into a second repo is the same DRY problem as copy-pasting code

Agentic workflows are showing up everywhere, but most companies that want one don’t have the in-house expertise to build it. This is an early...

The “software factory” idea going around the industry right now, described well here, is many harnessed loops fed by a queue of work and...

The requirements meeting has a cost

Crystal and I built DoggieDo, an app for dog owners to find dog-friendly places nearby and keep a profile for their dog. We shelved...

Early in covid, a lot of people were suddenly working remote with a workday that had bookends but no structure in between. Crystal and...

Recently, Crystal and I went to the new cove section of Bushwick Inlet Park with Jupiter. It sits on Franklin between N 12th and...

A venture-scale plan can falter without the business dying

There was almost always something they needed to solve in the morning. Sometimes, they ran out of coffee and it was off to the...

The radio was on low. The kids were at the counter in their pajamas, eating Cheerios. She rinsed her bowl.

A subway trivia game I built with Crystal. She came up with the concept and did the UI; I wrote the data layer and...

At work, we built an ingest pipeline against CMS’s Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA), pulling ExplanationOfBenefit, Claim, and Patient data to give downstream systems...

The team runs a fleet of vendor integrations: two flat-file vendors it pulls from over SFTP, a third that pushes files into an SFTP...

Alignment lives at the facet level

A scheduled merge into dim_members overwrote the member_id for a few hundred rows. The job had run the same way every day for months....

In the last post, we built out the model structure: staging, intermediate, marts. This post is about testing it: asserting that what those models...

This past weekend my dad and I flew down to Atlanta, rented a car, and drove out to our hometown of Cartersville, Georgia for...

In the last post, we talked about the ownership problem: the transformation layer had grown into logic copied between notebooks and SQL duplicated across...

A transformation layer accumulates duplicate logic fast. An analyst needs a number, writes a script, and pushes the result to a table in Postgres....