McWelling Todman

I am a programmer living in the New York area. I work at Foursquare, the check-in app designed for drinking in the West Village circa 2015 turned geospatial juggernaut. My pet clanker made this website for me because I can't stand javascript.

Books I've enjoyed recently

• The Stormlight Archive, Brandon Sanderson - I recently read Arc 1 (books 1-5) over the course of 2 months. Excellent. The characters are wonderful. The Cosmere is immense. The mechanics of supernatural phenomena are explained. What's not to love?
• Teixcalaan Series, Arkady Martine - AM writes the humanities / social sciences equivalent of hard science fiction. What a delight to stumble across someone with a day job who wrote a hugo winner in her free time. It's evident she is head and shoulders smarter than you almost immediately, but you never feel talked down to. Her mastery of internal dialogue is remarkable and the titles are so, so good (A Memory Called Empire, A Desolation Called Peace).

Last cool thing I worked on

• Places Dataset Triviality Detectors - Wrote a classification library that identifies trivial Address and Url mutations. It can be used to reduce change request noise generated by our fleet of web crawlers.