I grew up in a commercial fishing family in Kodiak, Alaska. In small towns like Kodiak, local businesses, agencies, and resource managers look after their communities and the resources they depend on, and I’d like to see more of the best modern software and data science within their reach.
After undergrad and a master’s in math from Montana State University, I became a programmer and researcher at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle. In 2025, I started building software for my brother’s air taxi business in Kodiak.
I believe quality software and open science should serve everyone, not just organizations with large IT budgets. If you have an idea for a project, get in touch!
Talk about a project or email will@dummthings.dev
Air taxi flight tracking
Logs flights automatically from Garmin inReach trackers, sends takeoff and landing notifications, and keeps maintenance due dates and pilot duty logs from the flight time it records. Hosted plans, or run it yourself: the code is open source.
Public aerial imagery, mosaicked and hosted
Public-domain USGS orthoimagery of the Kodiak Archipelago (2004-2011, and the 2019 refuge survey). I stitch the source files into seamless mosaics and serve them as free web map tiles for web maps, GIS software, and mapping apps.
Forecasts by text message
Text a location and get back a NOAA point or marine zone forecast, an aviation TAF or METAR, or an ADF&G fisheries announcement. It works from satellite messengers like the Garmin inReach, where there’s no internet.
Exploration of preliminary election data
Examines preliminary election data from the Alaska Division of Elections for the 2026 General Election. Dive deeper than the official preliminary results with ballot ranking data, ranked choice tabulation of currently available ballots, and simulations of likely election outcomes.
Whenever possible I publish my code under an open-source license. This means that anyone may read, run, or improve the code I write, or use it in another project.
Wingbeat is an example: the whole flight tracker is on GitHub under the AGPL, and the hosted plans pay for its development.
Email will@dummthings.dev.