I purchased fireislandferryschedules.com back in August 2015 with the intention of building a website that would let people easily search the schedules for the various Fire Island ferries. If you’re not familiar, the schedules are published every few months in PDF format and can be super confusing to figure out.

Every year I told myself I’d build a website, but then summer would come and go, and I’d never get around to it. In May 2025, almost 10 years later, I finally got around to it.

Instead of a website, I decided to take the opportunity to create my first iOS app. I’d been meaning to learn React Native for a while, and this project was the perfect excuse to do so. It also gave me a chance to experiment with Cursor and see how much AI could help with development. While it provided a helpful starting point, I ended up rewriting a lot of the code myself.

I manually converted PDF schedules for three main terminals and fourteen Fire Island communities into a more structured format. As of right now (with schedules through September 2025), the database has over 24,000 rows of schedule data.

The app downloads all the schedules from a remote database and stores them locally on each user’s device. This allows for completely offline searching, which is a huge win given the sometimes spotty cell service on Fire Island.

I had a ton of fun building this and learning the ins and outs of shipping an iOS app. I plan to keep improving it over the summer. Expect a more detailed post about the process in the future.

As the NHL season was winding down, several teams were battling for the final two wildcard playoff spots in each conference. Reddit user r/Sarke1 had created a visual breakdown of the wildcard race and shared it on r/hockey. I thought it was a great idea and decided to build a site that could update automatically as games were completed.

The site is completely static, only pulling data from the NHL API at build time. A GitHub Action runs every 5 minutes to check the scoreboard and triggers a new build if a game has recently ended.

Once the regular season ended, I turned off the GitHub Action, but I plan to start it up again next season.

I had the opportunity to speak to my daughter’s 2nd-grade class during Career Week about being a Software Engineering Manager. Explaining the world of software to a group of 7-year-olds was quite a challenge, but I tried to make it as fun as possible. I used Reveal.js to create a 15-slide presentation which I shared with the class. After the presentation, I asked each student to come up and type in their name, favorite color, animal, and emoji into the code of a website I created with Astro.