I'm still here, still working on doing & making things - and systems better. Most of my writing lately has been over at Better North Shore (https://www.betternorthshore.ca), the municipal advocacy group I co-founded
My personal projects lately have been less about writing prose about how I did something, and more sharing how I built something - often with programming code - and sometimes electronics. They've been more suited to a place designed for sharing and collaborating on code - GitHub.
Check-out my GitHub (https://github.com/dpwilcock), to see some of what I’ve been up to. Two of them sum up what has me excited right now.
- One keeps an eye on what my municipality is about to do.
- Another other keeps an eye on my health & my family’s health - through data.
Municipal Council Watchdog
Automated municipal council agenda monitoring for my municipal advocacy organization in BC. (www.BetterNorthShore.ca)This watches 3 municipal council websites for regular council meetings at the 3 munis we watch and aim to contribute to. It downloads the agenda package, scans it for housing, transportation and climate items (our 3 priorities) and produces a briefing digest — so members our chat server (Discord) can more easily see & stay on top of what council is about to decide.
Instead of digging through 3 sets of agenda PDFs by hand before every meeting - let's be honest, that was rarely happening in full - we get a digest that surfaces the items that matter to us. Each municipality exposes its agenda differently, this normalizes the output by storing them on a Google Drive with permanent, consistent, and shareable links, including the digest.
It's built to be adapted to other minis “forked” in programmer parlance: the readme file walks you through adding your own municipality.
https://github.com/dpwilcock/municipal-council-watchdog
Personal Health Monitor
My watch data used to be trapped in Apple's cloud, doing a handful of curated things. Now every metric lands in my own database, where I can run fatigue scoring, sleep/HRV correlations, CUSUM change detection, and get my own charts generated by my Ai/LLM agent. Owning the data means I get to ask the questions, not just the ones Apple thought of.
Data is pushed to a local server/computer/laptop that also runs an Ai/LLM agent, which coordinates and leads the analysis work that this ingestion makes possible.
https://github.com/dpwilcock/apple-health-data-monitor
Why this matters to me
Both projects follow the same philosophy: take something important - our local governments, and community - or your own body — and don't rely on someone else's black box to tell you what's happening. The tools are small, MIT-licensed (meaning freely adaptable), and designed to be borrowed, riffed on, and changed for your needs.. Let’s see what we can build together! The code is sitting there on GitHub waiting for you to riff on. Enjoy! 🙃💪❤️
