The Bugs That Only Appear on the Second Run
Putting a working pipeline on a schedule surfaced four bugs that were invisible on run one, including one that ate 12,563 business formation records.
Builder Journal
Nearly a Third of Colorado Springs Private Jobs Are in Sectors Whose Real Wage Went Nowhere
Between 2014 and 2025, five private sectors holding 76,332 El Paso County jobs saw their average real wage stall or fall. Health care, the county's largest private employer, gained $23 a week in eleven years.
Regional Economics
The File That Was 269 Characters Too Big
My writing app's assistant kept saying it couldn't see the world bible. It took four commits to find out the file was 269 characters over the budget.
Builder Journal
The Allow Button Doesn't OCR
Permission dialogs sat on my agent's console until I happened to notice. Building a watcher that could see them, and click them, meant OCR, geometry, and one very small allowlist.
Builder Journal
The Mac Mini Is the Cloud Now
This week I deleted a cloud job runner and moved my site builder's AI onto a Mac Mini in my house. The reasoning beat the wiring.
Builder Journal
The Only Part of the Colorado Springs Job Market Still Growing Is Health Care
One in five new Colorado Springs jobs over the last decade was in health care, and for the last two years it is the only part of the market still growing. A QCEW data brief on the sector carrying the county, and the paychecks that stood still.
Regional Economics
What Counts as a Closed Business?
An economic brief I published rests on a single number. The query was six lines. The hard part was deciding what "closed" and "in the county" actually mean across 1.5 million messy public records.
Regional Economics
The One Number That Shows Colorado Springs' Business Engine Stalled in 2024
For a decade, Colorado Springs started about four businesses for every one that closed. In 2024 that ratio fell to 2.53 to 1, its lowest on record. Here is what the Secretary of State filings show, and why the closures landed where they did.
Regional Economics
The Audit That Couldn't Save Itself
The audit found a real problem on one of my sites. Then it failed to save its own report. The real story of the week was a migration, not a check.
Builder Journal