Thomas
August
Ryan

Work Posts Résumé

My Work For

Districts and Development Conditions Report



All the info you could want on properties in King County.

Built to replace an existing web app of the same name from the mid-2000’s, this report has every piece of data about your parcel tracked by King County. Thanks to clever data management, spatial SQL queries, and caching it takes less than a second to lookup a property.

My Posts About the Districts Report


June 20th, 2024

King County Districts and Development Conditions Report | Improved Performance and Modern Look

The biggest improvement is performance. On average it’s more than twice as fast to look up a parcel and in heavy traffic scenarios, it can be nearly instant.

June 6th, 2024

Announcing the new Districts and Development Conditions Report

King County GIS Center is launching the new Districts and Development Conditions Report (also referred to in short as the Districts Report) application to the public and King County internal staff!

January 19th, 2024

Understanding Users of Tabular GIS Data

Understanding your users is one of the most difficult problems in software development.

ESRI Usage Report



Look at ESRI app usage at King County.

Built to replace an excel spreadsheet generated from a few SQL queries and a rather complex Access database the Usage reporting web app is an internal only product of the King County GIS Center that allows us to show our customers how much value they’re getting from our ESRI licensed apps like ArcMap, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Pro. A quarterly report is produced from this app that KC employes can review on the King County State of GIS website.

My Posts About the Usage Report


November 1st, 2023

Who is using ArcGIS Pro anyway?

Given that ESRI is ending support for ArcGIS Desktop in 2026, the King County GIS Center needed to understand the migration of users from ArcGIS Desktop to ArcGIS Pro.

Road Assets Editor



Edit road assets in King County.

Built to support the Roads department at King County, the Road Assets Editor, is an interactive mapping and asset management web app. It allows you to see every road asset in King County, create new assets, and update the properties of existing assets like road signs, curbs, and crosswalks. This app is used everyday to manage the process of improving the County’s road system.

My Posts About the Road Assets Editor


June 15th, 2023

WAGISA 2023

Today I woke up early at 7 AM and drove down to the UW Tacoma campus to present at the WAGISA conference.

May 21th, 2022

Cleaning up a .NET 6 Web API Converted from Visual Basic

The Road Assets Editor or RAE is a tool that enables employees to review all road assets built in King County.

April 17th, 2022

Load a CSV into SQLite on Startup in ASP.NET Core 6

When I deploy my ASP.NET Core 6 app I want it to gather CSV formatted data and ingest it into SQLite as part of its startup process.

Phone Numbers in Bulk



A query for many numbers in bulk.

When large organizations switch VOIP phone service providers often they bring their existing phone numbers with them. I built this tool that accepts phone numbers in groups of up to a few hundred and investigates each of them to verify that they can be ported to our network. It also shows the user the current ownership of each number so that they can verify and audit the numbers that they are submitting to us before we begin the complex process of bringing them over to our network. Our customers love this tool. 🥰

Number Search



A 206 area code query in Number Search.

In support of my brother's company, I wrote a console application that scrapes phone numbers that are available for purchase from a pair of SOAP APIs and a few REST API, and then aggregates them into a locally hosted database. You can review the results of the ingest process and quickly lookup available phone numbers on the Accelerate Networks website.

My Posts About Number Search


April 8th, 2020

Adding Security Headers to an ASP.NET Core 3.1 MVC Web App

Initially it received an ‘F’ grade when I ran it through the SecurityHeaders.com benchmark. This wasn’t the result I was looking for. Luckily, the solution is wildly simple.

November 29, 2019

Adding a Loading Spinner to an ASP.NET Core 3.0 MVC Web App

Recently I built an ASP.NET Core 3.0 MVC Web app that acts as a front end for a group of APIs that are each supported by a different third-party vendor.

Kitsap County Parcel Details



A comparison of the taxes between years in Parcel Details.

My primary responsibility at Kitsap County was maintaining the 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; In the summer of 2018 I rebuilt Parcel Details as an ASP.NET Core MVC project. What I'm most proud of is getting the average page weight down from 6 MBs to less than 200 KBs.

My Posts About Parcel Details


March 3rd, 2020

Malicious Scraping and Account Number Schemes

On Monday morning just before 11 AM my supervisor walked into my cube. “Hey Tom, did you change anything about the voting precincts query lately?”

July 30, 2019

Using Dapper and .NET Core to pull data from SQL Server 2000

I’m in the process of porting a web app from .NET Framework to dotnet core.

May 11, 2019

How I Converted ADO.NET DataSets into Dapper data models

Parcel Details is a monolithic .NET web app written using the now deprecated Web Forms framework that Microsoft introduced in 2002

Feburary 7, 2019

Purging the Search Page

About 60 percent of its users enter Parcel Details through the search page. The search page calls out to a SOAP service with query and then it’s returned a JSON payload of results.

January 17, 2019

Making Zoning Codes Useful

Big pushes are being made in major cities across the Northwest to rethink their zoning codes.

January 4, 2019

Parsing Tax Descriptions

Tax Descriptions are extremely difficult to parse, let alone meaningfully understand, if you're not a surveyor or parcel specialist.

November 7, 2018

A Most Disappointing Bug Report Button

I've been reading a lot of HackerNews the last few months. One of the ideas that I've picked up from reading the comments there has been the idea of creating short feedback loops.

June 17, 2018

Buttons As Actions

One of the UX issues I’ve been struggling with is designing my web apps to make their workflow as clear as possible.

June 15, 2018

Modernizing Kitsap County’s Parcel Details

Parcel Details is a public service offered by Kitsap County that allows anyone to look up information on a parcel of land using a tax account, street address, or parcel ID number.

Plats Search



A Plat in Plats.

Plats Search is web app that allows you to look up survey and plat documents related to a tax parcel. 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.

My Posts About Plats Search


October 10, 2019

Quickly Indexing File Directories in ASP.NET Core 3.0

I recently upgraded an ASP.NET Core 2.2 web app to 3.0. As part of this process I took some time to review the existing code base.