Sef Kloninger — engineer, engineering manager, and writer.
Lately I've been a volunteer contributor to the Big Local News project at Stanford. In my next post I'll describe what I've been doing — I think it's interesting. But this post is about the people and the project, which has been the best part. Why Journalism? Why Journalists? I didn't go looking to be part of journalism. It's not something I've ever done, not really even something I've aspired to.…
I like the command line. But more and more I find myself mediating those tasks through a chat , which surprises me because I used to find chat frustrating. But Claude is just so darn helpful. Here's an example. I've been working on a typical scrape-and-loader for election data. It does one election cycle at a time to split up the work and give you a chance to inspect. After the first download, I…
I'd like to discuss an app I just wrote. Not so much the app itself, but how I made it and why. You can try it out yourself. The web version is Leafletter.app and there's an iPhone app available on the Apple App Store . The about page has a short description of what it does. There are a couple of test campaigns where you can log a pretend leaflet distribution trip. Give it a try, that's what those…
This week I used Claude as my pipeline engineer and data analyst. I had a ton of fun and figured I'd write about it. I've been taking a Data Visualization class at Stanford Continuing Studies (TECH 26, Winter 2026). I needed a final project. There's this data set I've always wanted to play with, TweetsKB . Researchers took the Twitter Firehose data from 2013-23, back when it was more available ,…
It's been nice having AI tools at the ready for cleanup work. You know, those tasks that require a little program or script. Sure you can write it yourself, but it won't be fun, and it'll take some time, so instead you just don't bother and it doesn't get done. Instead of just knocking this out I decided this would be a fun one to try with the two tools I'm using the most these days, Gemini and…
This is a story about my recent experience Vibe Coding. The work itself isn't impressive and this writeup isn't different than the many gee-whiz posts you see these days. I didn't do three apps in a day . But I wanted to write up my experience, mostly to give me an excuse to tell an old-time programming story from the 1900's. Today, 2026 While I'm on a break I'm taking a Vibe Coding class . It's a…
Recently I've been beguiled by my local disk being almost full. This is on my everyday M3 MacBook Air running the latest Tahoe 26.2. For years I've used Daisy Disk to debug space issues like this, it's great. In this case it showed the problem, but wasn't able to narrow down what the problem was nor remove it. With no success through the normal means ("Googling around"), I wrote the developer of…
Governments should produce public goods , like navigation aids and roads. That seems like a reasonable thing to expect of a functioning government, right? I consider data a public good too. We all benefit from accurate maps, thorough measurements of the natural world, and trustworthy economic data. Which is why I was so upset when I heard how the current US administration has been on a tear to…
I was fortunate to have met and shared a meal with Rob Reiner some years back. I wanted to take a moment to share this story on the sad occasion of his death this week. It was 2003 or so. I lived and worked for Akamai in Boston. I had been going back and forth to San Mateo office a fair bit that year, often taking a red eye home from San Jose. Back then the San Jose airport was smaller than it is…
💩 I turned off comments on this site today. The good people at Disqus had provided me with a free service for commenting that had worked for ten-plus years. But they appear to have gone down the enshittification path and started running a bunch of link-spam right above the comment box on all my pages. Of course they did. I captured a screenshot if you want to see. Boo. Shame on me for entrusting…