Architecture
Thirty-Four Feeds and a Philosophy
The Citizen’s Daily Brief ingests news from thirty-four RSS feeds. That number started at twenty-seven, and grew incrementally during testing. It grew because the original list had a gap that would have undermined credibility: it didn’t include enough sources from across the political spectrum to claim it was seeing the full picture. The CDB isn’t a political product — it’s apolitical by design, and keeping it that way meant expanding the source feeds.
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Building an Automated Analyst
The Citizen’s Daily Brief is a daily brief for the people, modeled after a similar intelligence brief that has been delivered to the U.S. President since 1946. Like the PDB, the CDB isn’t a news aggregator. It doesn’t summarize articles. It doesn’t curate links. It produces assessments — structured analytical judgments about what happened in the world, what it means, how confident we are, and what to watch next. That distinction sounds like marketing copy, but it’s actually the architectural decision that shaped every line of code in the CDB pipeline. And it’s a specific decision given that this project deliberately leans into the strengths of AI.
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Flipping the Question: From 'Is It Too Wet?' to 'Is It Too Dry?'
When I first built the Groundwise engine for the Ridewise app, it answered one question: is it too wet to ride? Low wetness meant good conditions. High wetness meant stay home. Exactly what I needed for mountain biking, skateboarding, and other outdoor wheeled activities where surface conditions impacted by weather mattered.
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One Engine, Three Apps: Sharing a Swift Decision Engine Across Products
In the previous articles I’ve covered what the Groundwise engine does and how the drying model works. This article is about the architectural decision that turned one app into three: sharing a single decision engine across Ridewise (trail conditions), Fieldwise (sports field conditions), and Yardwise (watering guidance).
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I Built a Weather Engine That Tells You When to Ride, Play, or Water
Every mountain biker knows the ritual. It rained last night. You check the radar, clear now. You check the trail association’s Facebook page, nobody’s posted. You text your riding buddy: “Think the trails are good?” They don’t know either. So you either stay home and miss a perfectly rideable day, or show up and chew through muddy trails that needed another six hours to dry.
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