Hi! People call me Tom.
I'm a GIS Programmer at Kitsap County.
Working for the County is fun. Recently a tornado touched down a few blocks from my office. At the request of the County Sheriff I helped make a map of the impacted area that first-responders used to assess the damage. Then I built a front end for an FTP server to help the public lookup survey documents recorded in Kitsap.
Right now I'm working on a data syncing tool for the County that can be run via browser, console, or scheduled task. It pulls account valuations and related data from an old MS-SQL database, formats the data, and then submits it to a vendor's borderline undocumented private REST API.
- 28.1K Users a Month
- ~50% of Users on IE 11 or Below
- Average Page Load Time of 765ms
My primary responsibility is maintaining the County's public parcel information system. Parcel Details is a web app that allows anyone to look up a tax parcel in Kitsap County.
Parcel Details was originally an ASP.NET 4 WebForms project that used rapid application development tools provided by a vendor to define its business logic and user interface. Since I took over it's maintenance, I've upgraded the project to .NET 4.7.2, lead a redesign of the user interface, rewrote the business logic and views to remove all dependencies on the vendor's tools, and migrated the database calls from ancient ADO.NET Datasets to a micro Object Relational Mapper (ORM) called Dapper.
What I'm most proud of is getting the average page weight down from 6 MBs to less than 200 KBs. This was achieved despite the addition of a responsive CSS framework (Bootstrap 3.3.7), helpful icons, and a variety of new interactive features.
- 1.5K Users a Month
- 25.35ms Server Response Time
- Average Page Load Time of 516ms
Plats Search is web app that allows you to look up survey and plat documents related to a tax parcel.
It's an ASP.NET Core 2.2 project that I wrote from the ground up. Razor pages are used to define the views, Bootstrap is used to style the views, and Entity Framework Core 2.2 is the ORM we used to handle database interactions.
Getting a hold of Plat Records from most Counties in Washington requires going through the formal records request process. Plats Search circumvents this process by allowing people to search for Plats related to a tax parcel and directly download scans of those source documents.
I like camping. Often I'll go out to the Olympics and stay at sites like Lake Cushman, Deer Park, and the coastline around Lake Ozette. I'm also looking forward to ski season this winter.
For fun I've reimagined Kitsap County's parcel viewer as a 3D web map built on top of the MapboxGL.js library and the County's open data dumps.
I also know a bit about photography. You can see my work on Flikr. Right now I'm shooting with a Sony RX100 MKIV, a polarizing filter, and gorilla pod.
As of November 2018 I am the author of the top text result on Google for "How to install RAM". Although I don't write product reviews anymore, I still have a deep interest in computer hardware.
I'm helping my dad rebuild his old pickup truck. You can see my project tracking repo on GitHub.
Open this page in the Desktop version of Chrome. Then hit the 'F12' key to open Chrome's inspect mode. Click the 'Network' tab. Finally hit the 'CTRL' and 'F5' keys at the same time to do a hard refresh.
Performance is a feature. Identifying the most effective compromise often begins with a clear understanding of a project's purpose and constraints.
This is a personal website intended to give new friends an introduction to my world. It's not a social network, it's not a news outlet, and it's not SaaS startup.
To that end this page weighs in at about 5 kilobytes and loads with a single request to the web server.
I've opted not use a JavaScript framework, nor a CSS framework, nor even server-side rendering like I'm used to with ASP.NET.
Instead this page is hand-crafted. The style sheet is embedded in the head. And there's no JavaScript, polyfills, or images to speak of.
It's lightning fast and purpose built.