Conversations with Program Notes
An early look at natural-language search across 145 years of BSO program notes. Asking questions of our music history in ways we've never been able to ask before.
All Posts
16 articles
The Promise of AI Productivity
A UC Berkeley study found AI tools made employees work more, not less. I don't fully agree, but there are takeaways helping shape an AI pilot at the BSO.
AWS Imagine Nonprofit 2026: Notes and Takeaways
Notes from AWS Imagine for Nonprofits 2026. AI governance rooted in mission values, the Jane Goodall Institute's document processing pipeline, and getting AI into workflows.
Snowflake Data for Breakfast Boston 2026: Notes and Takeaways
Notes from Snowflake Data for Breakfast Boston 2026. A three-pillar AI framework, why the semantic layer matters, and a real-world unstructured data pipeline built on Cortex Search.
Images — Responsive, Modern, and Good Enough for Now
CSS Grid breakout layout for Medium-style image sizing, a Figure component for captions and lazy loading, and the decision to defer optimization until the content demands it.
Open Formats, Commercial Compute
Why open data formats — Apache Iceberg in particular — have become central to how I think about data platform decisions. Not a migration story. A question about optionality.
The Invisible Features
The parts of a site no visitor sees but search engines, feed readers, and social platforms depend on — structured data, syndication, and discoverability.
Layout and Navigation
Why heading hierarchy, landmarks, and keyboard flow get attention first. Building Astro's Base layout as a structural foundation.
Making Prose Look Right — Styling Markdown for Long-Form Content
Making blog posts feel approachable rather than dense — line length, spacing, and the typographic hierarchy inside an Astro Prose component.
A Design System Before Any Design
Fonts, colors, layout, and icons — the visual foundation for a personal site, built with Tailwind v4 design tokens and variable fonts.
Content Collections and the Blog Loop
Defining a content schema, setting up MDX, building the blog listing and dynamic post routes. Why content comes before styling.
Setting Up the Workshop — Documenting for AI Collaborators
Why CLAUDE.md and .cursorrules come before most building. Onboarding AI collaborators with persistent context about architecture, conventions, and constraints.
First Boot — Scaffolding an Astro v6 Project
Turning the Astro and Cloudflare decisions into a running project — from bun create astro to first deploy, and knowing when to stop.
Why I Chose Astro and Cloudflare Workers for this Blog
Astro v6 beta, Cloudflare Workers, and the guiding principles behind this build — why these tools, and what I'm counting on.
Markdown & MDX Style Examples
A living specimen of every text, image, and component treatment available in posts — Markdown primitives and MDX components side by side.
Hello World: What I'm Building Here
A place to share what I'm learning about technology, mission, and the work of building in public.