Beyond GIS
Independent builds, side ventures, and ongoing projects — each one started as a real problem and kept going until it was useful.
Generating high-quality, standards-aligned practice materials is one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching math. howe2math automates it. The platform handles everything from problem bank design to payment processing to email delivery — built to solve a problem I deal with every day.
The stack is FastAPI on the backend, PostgreSQL via Neon for the database, Cloudflare R2 for file storage, Stripe for payments, Clerk for authentication, Railway for hosting, and Resend for transactional email. Every component was chosen deliberately — serverless-friendly, cost-effective at low traffic, and replaceable without rewriting everything around it.
The architecture that built howe2math — relational database design, REST API structure, working with structured data at scale — transfers directly to GIS data pipelines and web mapping backends. The problems are the same; the data just has coordinates.
DOKtor
Depth of Knowledge Classifier
DOKtor is a standalone public-facing tool within the howe2math ecosystem. Teachers upload or photograph a math problem and DOKtor returns a Depth of Knowledge (DOK) level classification with confidence scores across all four levels.
The UI leans into a medical theme — "Diagnosis," "Examine," "Prescription" — which turned out to fit the use case well. A teacher submits a problem, DOKtor examines it, and returns a structured classification with confidence breakdowns.
Training data
~2,800 Algebra 1 problems, individually classified
Ground truth
Published teacher edition DOK labels — used as accuracy benchmark, not reproduced in output
v2 Accuracy
73.3% exact — 22/30 correct (+23.3 pp over baseline). 100% adjacent-DOK accuracy (no off-by-more-than-one errors).
Expansion pipeline
Geometry and Algebra 2 (~8,400+ problems) in progress
Samuel Bellamy & the Whydah
GIS-Integrated Curriculum Unit
A GIS-integrated curriculum unit for middle schoolers built around the story of Samuel Bellamy and the Whydah — the most significant pirate shipwreck in American archaeological history. The unit connects to the Real Pirates traveling exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and uses the wreck's discovery as a vehicle for teaching how spatial thinking evolves across centuries.
The cartographic thread at the center of the unit is what makes it work: Cyprian Southack's 1717 chart of the wreck site was used in the immediate aftermath of the sinking to coordinate salvage efforts. Barry Clifford used that same chart — updated with modern bathymetric data and sonar survey techniques — to locate the wreck in 1984. The 267-year chain from Southack's hand-drawn survey to Clifford's sonar grid is a GIS story told without calling it one.
Currently in active development for an upcoming summer engagement.
Mapparatus is the organizational home for GIS tools, web mapping applications, and spatial consulting work. TappyMaps and Geopuesto operate under the Mapparatus umbrella. The consulting side is in early formation — focused on small-to-midsize clients who need spatial analysis or web mapping without a full GIS hire.
If you have a spatial data problem that needs a translator — someone who can move between the analysis, the visualization, and the audience — that's the work Mapparatus is built for.