I build and operate data infrastructure over very large, messy corpora: the pipelines, the public APIs that serve them, and the search indexes on top.
I'm the CTO at OpenAlex, an open index of the world's scholarly literature — 320M+ works behind a free public API, built by a small team on a small budget. I've been its primary backend author for eight years.
I write here about what I'm working on and what I've learned doing it: Python, data pipelines, public APIs, search, and lately coding agents. More on theabout page.
Writing
- Claude Code never read the docs in 63 runs; one error message was worth six turns
A coding agent given real integration tasks in a clean container never opened the documentation, a breaking release cost six extra turns even when every run passed, and one helpful import error was worth the same again.
- Connect a PostgreSQL RDS database to Heroku
This tutorial will show you how to create and connect a postgres database hosted with Amazon Web Service’s RDS to a Heroku application.
- Switching to Pycharm
Over the past few weeks I’ve been transitioning from my beloved Sublime Text and terminal combo to Pycharm Professional(https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/).
- Save API Results to PostgreSQL for Free with AWS Lambda
How to use AWS Lambda to save the results of an API response to a PostgreSQL database on a recurring schedule, at no cost.
- Implement Short URL Tags in Flask Using Hashids
One issue you need to watch for in your SaaS application is using auto-incrementing IDs in your application’s URLs.
- Why I Like Flask
I’m a huge fan of the python micro framework Flask. Here are the reasons why.