The build catalog: three things shipping before year-end

Three things on the bench right now, all aimed at wrapping before the end of the year.

1. ALVI — beta release

Database refactoring is underway. The next step will be ripping out the custom web scraper that's been feeding ALVI's knowledge base and replacing it with Tavily, used as an MCP tool — cleaner data, no scraper to maintain, and one less thing that can silently break. Once that swap is in and re-validated against the RAG pipeline, ALVI ships its beta.

2. Enigma machine on an ATtiny85

A full software reimplementation of the cipher, verified against an independently built simulator, then hand-ported to run on an ATtiny85 with ~6 KB of flash — closing with a physical build that proves it out byte-for-byte, not just by eyeballing a demo. Full written proposal has the details.

3. NYC schools × transit analysis — finishing it

Started 8 months ago, stalled for the last 5. The pipeline joins NYC OpenData school metrics with MTA transit data and clusters on transit access vs. student outcomes — the analysis itself is sound, it just needs to get finished and published as a proper Tableau writeup. This time around I'm bringing in Claude Code to speed up the remaining analysis and get it over the line instead of letting it stall a third time.