Supporting Medical Clinics in Ethiopia
About five times per year, Ethiopia ACT mobilizes week-long medical trips to provide care for hundreds of underserved people in Addis Ababa. I’ve been on three of these teams in the last five years and have used my tech skills to help.1 On my most recent trip, in January 2025, I built a clinic data system, based on feedback and conversations with the staff since 2024.
Screenshot: Dashboard of new clinic data system
The data system helps the organization to operate better during clinics and to prepare for future clinics. For this project, I used Ruby on Rails with Avo.
My Resume as Code
I wanted to update my resume, and I wound up also building a resume generation pipeline. If you too are tired of fighting with a word processor to get your resume just right, and would prefer to fight with LaTeX and Python and Docker, then this post is for you!
I’ve made the relevant source code available on GitHub.
Scraping with Selenium
In college, I had a friend with a part-time research job. One time we were chatting and he told me he had to copy and paste data from a government website into a Word document. He was explaining to me that he had over 20 hours of work left at the current pace, and wasn’t sure how he would get it all done with his other responsibilities.
I asked him if he was interested in getting it done faster with software. He said yes, and I had some time, so I wrote a small Python program to scrape the data for him. It was pretty easy: The data was on a public website, the pagination involved passing a number into a query string, and there were obvious CSS selectors to use to target the right data. I wasn’t the fastest; I wanted to explain what I was doing as I went, and I think it took me almost 2 hours, but the result was amazing to my friend, because it saved him at least 18 hours of work. I used Beautiful Soup in Python to do all the scraping tasks.
Simple Search
I recently used the emoji search feature in an app. I typed “car” and expected to be greeted with 🚗 as a top result but found things like 🥕 (carrot) to be much higher ranking. This post explores how a search algorithm for searching a small list can be enhanced.
Making a Booklet
Recently I was compiling a booklet of devotions for a mission trip. My goal was to make a simple booklet using standard paper, printed double-sided, and folded down the middle. I looked online for options and kept finding web-based tools that looked like overkill. I wanted a simple text booklet - no splashy template, no color, no images.
I had heard of Pandoc and PDFJam before and decided to give them a try. The tools worked really well for my use case. I thought I’d share what worked for me as it took me a bit to figure out, not having any prior experience with these tools.