Migrating a large Drupal-based academic social network to the Knowledge Commons WordPress platform.

![Screenshot of the HASTAC homepage](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: February - November 2022

Technologies: PHP, WordPress API, Drupal API

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is a venerable academic social network that needed a new, more sustainable home. Working in collaboration with their developer, I migrated thousands of posts, pages, and sites, and approximately 20,000 user accounts to Knowledge Commons. The involved programmatically creating user accounts, sites, and posts, linking everything together, and creating a mechanism for users to retain control of their content on a new platform.

Building Mailchimp integration for the Knowledge Commons network.

![Screenshot of an Humanities Commons onboarding email](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: September 2023

Technologies: PHP, WordPress API, Mailchimp API

GitHub: [MESH-Research/knowledge-commons-wordpress](https://www.twine.net/signin

Knowledge Commons is a complex social networking application, and one of its persistent challenges is onboarding new users. Previously we kept in touch with users through our transactional email system, but it was clunky and difficult for our community team to manage. I built the Mailchimp integration to automatically kick off a series of onboarding emails to new users and to add and remove users from our regular newsletter.

Modernizing and containerizing the Knowledge Commons WordPress application.

![Screenshot of the Amazon ECS dashboard showing the Knowledge Commons WordPress services](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: May 2023 - July 2024

Technologies: Docker, Lando, AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Secrets Manager, GitHub Actions

GitHub: [MESH-Research/knowledge-commons-wordpress](https://www.twine.net/signin

Before this project, [Knowledge Commons](https://www.twine.net/signin ran on a traditional LEMP stack, with development taking place through live filesystem edits and pulling changes from GitHub. Local development was infeasible. This (very large) project involved centralizing the Knowledge Commons WordPress application in a single repository, containerizing the application, using Lando for local development, moving most configuration to environment variables configured through AWS Secrets Manager, creating a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions, and deploying to AWS ECS with a blue/green deployment strategy that allows for zero downtime deployments and end-to-end testing of deployments before exposing them to regular users.

Building a backend search service for the Knowledge Commons network.

![Screenshot of the Knowledge Commons Search architecture diagram](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: January - May 2024

Technologies: Go, ElasticSearch / OpenSearch, PHP

GitHub: [MESH-Research/commons-connect](https://www.twine.net/signin

As the [Knowledge Commons](https://www.twine.net/signin network expanded from a monolithic WordPress instance to a network of applications, we needed a new backend search that could unify users’ content. I built a search service in Go that serves an API gateway backed by Amazon’s OpenSearch service. Then I built WordPress functionality that provisioned users content to the service and queried the service for results.

Building a full-featured museum management system in WordPress.

![Screenshot of the Museum for WordPress Plugin running on utsic.utoronto.ca](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: 2017-2021; 2024-present (major overhaul)

Technologies: PHP, WordPress API, JavaScript, SCSS, React

GitHub: [Epistemic-Technology/wp-museum](https://www.twine.net/signin

Museum for WordPress is a full-featured museum management system built for the [University of Toronto Scientific Instruments Collection](https://www.twine.net/signin It is designed to make it easy for organizations and individuals to manage and share their collections of physical artifacts while tightly integrating with a WordPress website.

Building an Obsidian plugin to sync GitHub issues and pull requests to an Obsidian note.

![Screenshot of the GitHub Tasks Obsidian Plugin showing an Obsidian note with a list of tasks](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: June 2025

Technologies: TypeScript, GitHub API, Obsidian API

GitHub: [Epistemic-Technology/obsidian-github-tasks](https://www.twine.net/signin

GitHub Tasks is a simple, but powerful and flexible tool for synchronizing GitHub issues and pull requests with Obsidian tasks. I made it mainly so that I could use it myself to see all of my outstanding tasks in a single place.

Building a multi-provider chat application for [Obsidian](https://www.twine.net/signin

![Screenshot of the Co-Intelligence AI Obsidian Plugin, showing a text-based interface similar to ChatGPT](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: April - May 2025

Technologies: TypeScript, Vercel AI SDK, Obsidian API

GitHub: [Epistemic-Technology/co-intelligence](https://www.twine.net/signin

Co-Intelligence provides a full chat interface within Obsidian, allowing users to interact with a variety of LLMs, provide context from notes in their vault, and automatically save conversations as markdown-formatted notes.

Building a RAG-based chatbot for the Epistemic Technology website.

![Screenshot of the Epistemic Technology chatbot showing a brief interaction and the WarGames aesthetic](https://www.twine.net/signin

Dates: March 2025

Technologies: Go, OpenAI Go SDK, SQLite, SolidJS, TailwindCSS

GitHub: [Epistemic-Technology/epistemic.technology](https://www.twine.net/signin

The Epistemic Technology chatbot is a RAG-based chatbot built using the OpenAI Go SDK for generating embeddings and responses, and SQLite as a vector database. It uses SolidJS for the frontend. The app is rendered on top of the static website, and TailwindCSS is used to isolate the chatbot’s styles from the rest of the website. The chatbot’s aesthetic is meant to evoke the classic 80s movie WarGames.

I discuss this project in my blog post Building a Chatbot