<h1>The Climate Change Progress Bar</h1>
<img src="/images/blue_marble.jpg" alt="The Blue Marble">
<h2>The Problem</h2>
Over the last cou­ple years, I’ve no­ticed a grow­ing dis­tinc­tion be­tween two groups of peo­ple.
On one hand, we have those who deny cli­mate change is a prob­lem.
Some be­lieve it is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_conspiracy_theory">hoax</a>, while oth­ers merely don’t grasp the grav­ity of the sit­u­a­tion.
This per­spec­tive is mis­in­formed.
On the other hand, there are some who be­lieve cli­mate change is a prob­lem be­yond their abil­i­ties to im­pact.
They be­lieve that, as mere in­di­vid­u­als, there is not a sin­gle thing they can do that could have a mean­ing­ful ef­fect to­ward re­duc­ing car­bon emis­sions.
This per­spec­tive is equally mis­in­formed.
In re­al­ity, the cli­mate prob­lem is huge.
It will re­sult in mas­sive habi­tat losses for hu­man life and wildlife.
In all like­li­hood, hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple will lose the abil­ity to farm their land, ei­ther from drought, ﬂoods, lost soil fer­til­ity or wild­ﬁres.
<blockquote>
Side Note: If you want to learn more about hu­man mi­gra­tion in the 21st cen­tury, I highly rec­om­mend the doc­u­men­tary Climate Refugees.
</blockquote>
The point of this ar­ti­cle is not to con­vince you that cli­mate change is a real prob­lem that has real so­lu­tions.
At this point, I don’t need to tell you that the cli­mate prob­lem is ac­tively be­ing solved by some of the most coura­geous, in­ﬂu­en­tial, in­tel­li­gent minds in the world.
There are so­lu­tions out there that are hav­ing a <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_the_case_for_optimism_on_climate_change">huge im­pact</a>, but peo­ple don’t have a straight­for­ward way to dis­cover them.
The prob­lem I want to solve is this: there is no sin­gle met­ric or dash­board to see the progress of cli­mate change and its so­lu­tions.
<h2>What’s the Pitch?</h2>
As I am sure you ﬁg­ured out from the ti­tle, I want to make a progress bar for cli­mate change.
A sin­gle place peo­ple can go to see where we, as a planet and as a species, stand.
Func­tion­ally, I want to repli­cate how we can view <a href="https://www.usdebtclock.org/">fed­eral gov­ern­men­t’s debt in real time</a>, but for cli­mate change.
I’ve con­versed with a friend of mine, Anyll Markevich, who knows much more about cli­mate is­sues than I do.
While we would ob­vi­ously need mul­ti­ple rounds of peer re­view be­fore we can put any­thing of sub­stance out, Anyll has rec­om­mended I start my re­search in a cou­ple spe­ciﬁc ar­eas.
<h2>Planetary Boundaries</h2>
There ex­ist some pro­jects and tools that hold a sim­i­lar goal as the cli­mate change progress bar.
The clos­est I could ﬁnd was the Planetary Boundaries pro­ject.
When hav­ing an ar­gu­ment with some­one, there are some lines you just can­not cross.
Some lines are un­avoid­able.
God­win’s law states that “as an on­line dis­cus­sion grows longer, the prob­a­bil­ity of a com­par­i­son to Hitler ap­proaches 1.”
While com­par­ing your ar­gu­men­ta­tive op­po­nent to a geno­ci­dal dic­ta­tor is al­most never nec­es­sary or use­ful, the line gets crossed even­tu­ally.
The plan­et’s ecosys­tem is sim­i­lar.
There are cer­tain eco­log­i­cal lines that can­not not be crossed, like hav­ing more than 10 ex­tinc­tions per mil­lion species in a year, with­out sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on global eco­log­i­cal health.
The planet can han­dle a cer­tain amount of car­bon diox­ide in the air, but it can­not han­dle more than 350 parts per mil­lion with­out sig­nif­i­cant dam­age oc­cur­ring. At the time of writ­ing, <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><semantics><mrow><mi>C</mi><msub><mi>O</mi><mn>2</mn></msub></mrow><annotation encoding="application/x-tex">CO_2</annotation></semantics></math>CO2​ is cur­rently at 418 ppm.
<img src="/images/planetary_boundaries.webp" alt="The Planetary Boundaries Graph, Credit Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023.">
The above graph shows where the planet is on sev­eral plan­e­tary bound­aries.
As you can see, we’ve ex­ceeded most of them.
While plan­e­tary bound­aries are a great way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing where we are on a bunch of en­vi­ron­men­tal met­rics, it falls short of our goal in a few key ways.
For one, it does­n’t spe­cial­ize in cli­mate change.
While it does show cur­rent car­bon diox­ide lev­els, it does­n’t in­clude any other green­house gases, or how deepy they are ef­fect­ing global tem­per­a­tures.
Fi­nally, it is only up­dated an­nu­ally.
The Climate Change Progress Bar’s key trait is that it is real-time, so peo­ple can see how we stand in the cli­mate bat­tle right now.
<h2>Possible Data Sources</h2>
This is some­thing I need to speak to more cli­mate ex­perts on.
How­ever, at the bare min­i­mum there are a few el­e­ments our tech­nol­ogy can look at.
<h3>Real Time Carbon Data</h3>
Anyll sug­gested I look into the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00708-7">Carbon Monitor</a>, a real-time car­bon emis­sions’ dataset.
Since it does­n’t look like their API is ac­ces­si­ble, but their code is, it looks like we can just run in on our in­fra­struc­ture.
I need to look into the tech­ni­cal im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails a bit more, but ini­tial prospects are good.
<h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalized_difference_vegetation_index">Normalized Difference Vegetation Index</a></h3>
NDVI is an in­dus­try-stan­dard way of mea­sur­ing the pho­to­syn­thetic pro­duc­tiv­ity of plants around the globe.
It works by ap­ply­ing some sim­ple math on two bands of satel­lite im­agery, both of which are widely avail­able.
The com­par­a­tive low com­pu­ta­tional cost of get­ting the NDVI of an area is a boon for our real-time goals.
It seems like its main draw­back is that it does­n’t give us many met­rics on bio­di­ver­sity.
<h2>Getting Started</h2>
We want to get started on an MVP as quickly as pos­si­ble.
The rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity of the NVDI gives us a great way to set up and test a real-time data pro­cess­ing pipeline.
We aim to in­clude other met­rics, like pop­u­la­tion growth and clean in­vest­ing, but we want to pre­pare a pipeline ﬁrst.
<h2>Feedback</h2>
This post, as well as all other posts re­lated to this pro­ject, ex­ist to serve two pur­poses:
<ol>
<li>Bookkeeping and white­board­ing de­vice.</li>
<li>To get feed­back on every stage of the process.</li>
</ol>
In other words, I want to hear from you!
If you have any ideas to how we can make the Climate Change Progress bar bet­ter, let us know by email­ing <a href="mailto:feedback@elijahpotter.dev">feed­back@eli­jah­pot­ter.dev</a>
If there are bet­ter met­rics we should be in­clud­ing in our in­dex, tell us!

The Climate Change Progress Bar

<h1>The Books I Read in February and March 2025</h1>
In a world con­tain­ing TikTok, YouTube and a vast ar­ray of other apps that proﬁt off hu­man at­ten­tion, it takes ef­fort to place our fo­cus on things that truly ben­e­ﬁt our minds.
At least, that is what I would I say on LinkedIn as an ex­pla­na­tion for why I read.
In re­al­ity: I sim­ply en­joy it.
Each month I go back and sum­ma­rize what I’ve learned from the books I’ve read.
In do­ing so, I’ve found that I get both deeper in­sights and greater joy from the lit­er­a­ture.
<h3>Wait! What’s Up With February?</h3>
While I only ﬁn­ished one book in February, I started read­ing sev­eral oth­ers that I ended up ﬁn­ish­ing in March.
It only felt right to com­bine the two months into a sin­gle post.
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2986591a-fa02-4b02-b180-13b27708155c">The Dinner by Herman Koch</a></h2>
Someone con­vinced me to read this book based on its sim­ple premise: the en­tire novel is an ac­count of a sin­gle din­ner.
I was skep­ti­cal.
It is a big book.
How could they pos­si­bly ﬁt that much plot into a sin­gle din­ner?
The an­swer: Koch drip-feeds you in­for­ma­tion about the eclec­tic char­ac­ters in at­ten­dance.
They gain an ad­di­tional di­men­sion that you could­n’t achieve in an­other, more ac­tion-packed book.
I won’t spoil any­thing here, but the end­ing was a com­plete sur­prise to me.
I did not see that com­ing.
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/798488cf-0270-436c-900f-aac5fc26c71d">Gold by Isaac Asimov</a></h2>
I re­mem­ber read­ing Gold for the ﬁrst time on a camp­ing trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
I was cap­ti­vated by the dy­namic short-sto­ries con­tained within.
At the time I be­lieved them to be pure sci­ence ﬁc­tion.
Reading Gold for the sec­ond time re­vealed how wrong I was.
More than one of the ﬁc­tional ideas Asimov pre­sents in the col­lec­tion of short sto­ries has since come to re­al­ity.
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/6844cc6f-2652-415e-8783-d544cf26e3c8">My Grandma Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman</a></h2>
I’ll ad­mit: this novel was chal­leng­ing to ﬁn­ish.
Pros: the main char­ac­ter (an al­most-eight year old girl) is ex­pertly con­veyed in the writ­ing.
Back­man makes clever use of run-on sen­tences to con­vey frus­tra­tion, which is a lit­er­ary de­vice I’ve never seen be­fore.
Fur­ther, the char­ac­ter has an un­usual de­gree of in­sight into every­day as­pects of life.
I found my­self ap­pre­ci­at­ing my every day more plac­ing my­self in her shoes.
Cons: it takes a long time for the in­sights to start com­ing.
An ex­ces­sive de­gree of unim­por­tant in­for­ma­tion is thrown at you right out of the gate.
I had dif­ﬁ­culty main­tain­ing my fo­cus un­til the sec­ond half of the book (when stuff starts heat­ing up).
<h2><a href="https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/836aff10-4b4e-4b28-8a89-c8ed9e3f966a">Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus</a></h2>
Garmus knocked it out of the park for her ﬁrst novel.
It fol­lows Elizabeth Zott, who, in all re­spects is the per­son I want to be when I grow up.
Lessons in Chemistry is a tes­ta­ment to the value of sub­trac­tion.
The orig­i­nal man­u­script of this book was about twice as long as the ﬁ­nal pub­lished ver­sion.
The au­thor was forced to con­dense it down af­ter get­ting re­jected from sev­eral pub­lish­ers.
It ef­fort shows.
I can­not cap­ture the nov­el’s el­e­gance of prose, cre­ativ­ity in ﬁc­tion, or im­por­tance in moral­ity here.
You need to read this book.

Two months does not mean twice as many.

The Books I Read in February and March 2025

<h1>What Blasterhacks Taught Me About Leadership</h1>
<h2>The Beginning</h2>
Although it was sev­eral months ago, I re­mem­ber it like it was yes­ter­day.
It was what I would call a dusty Colorado Friday.
The sky was over­cast and the trees de­press­ingly bar­ren.
The air smelled of cow farts, which was typ­i­cal when the winds changed, blow­ing in cold air from the beef farms in the nearby town of Greeley.
In my mind, this sig­naled snow.
I walked into the Green Center, the build­ing in hous­ing the open­ing cer­e­mony of BlasterHacks, the hackathon run by the Colorado School of Mines.
I sign in at the en­trance and walk down into the au­di­to­rium.
As I greeted my team­mates, <a href="https://grantlemons.com/">Grant Lemons</a>, <a href="https://lukaswerner.com/">Lukas Werner</a> and <a href="https://b-sharman.dev/">Byron Sharman</a>, I no­ticed the ner­vous smiles on their faces.
You know the kind, the smile with the in­ner eye­brows slightly raised, shoul­ders tense.
We were ex­cited, but we also knew we had 36 solid hours of pro­gram­ming ahead of us.
After col­lec­tively down­ing sev­eral whole piz­zas and lis­ten­ing to the rules of the com­pe­ti­tion, we made our way over to Labriola Innovation Complex, the hours-old man­u­fac­tur­ing build­ing the com­pe­ti­tion would take place in.
<h2>The Plan</h2>
We brain­stormed some ideas un­der the over­cast sky:
<ul>
<li>A Bennett Foddy-inspired bat­tle-royale game where all the con­trols were <code>vim</code>-keybindings.</li>
<li>A health in­sur­ance app that es­ti­mates the cost of your care at all lo­cal hos­pi­tals.</li>
<li>An app that en­cour­aged you to stand up and move every thirty min­utes.</li>
</ul>
It was that last one that we all got ex­cited about.
We imag­ined it to be so­cial: at a ran­dom in­ter­val (which would av­er­age to thirty min­utes), the app would si­mul­ta­ne­ously send out a no­ti­ﬁ­ca­tion to every user.
Should the user choose to par­tic­i­pate in the StandUp mo­ment, the app would guide them all through the same short work­out ac­tiv­ity.
Fi­nally, the user had the choice to up­load “evidence” of the work­out, which could be a short cap­tion about what they were do­ing, or a photo.
The idea of StandUp (as we would go on to name our pro­ject) was in­spired si­mul­ta­ne­ously by <a href="https://bereal.com/en/">BeReal</a>, re­cent re­search in the detri­men­tal health ef­fects of re­mote work, and the use of so­cial li­a­bil­ity for com­par­a­tively more ex­treme work­outs (Strava).
<img src="/images/screenshot_standup.webp" alt="The Feed page of standup after a user has posted">
Of course, most of this had yet to be nailed down yet, for we were just en­ter­ing the Labriola Innovation Complex.
I re­mem­ber ask­ing my­self if I would leave be­fore the com­pe­ti­tion was over.
Al­though I was tired from the days classes and home­work, I felt a drive to ded­i­cate my whole self to this pro­ject.
<h2>The Board</h2>
We sat down and cre­ated a new <a href="https://github.com/grantlemons/blasterhacks2024">git repos­i­tory</a>.
That’s when I started think­ing about how we were go­ing to or­ga­nize our work.
I pro­posed we setup a KanBan board, a pro­ject man­age­ment tech­nique I had picked up at <a href="https://archytasinc.com">Archytas Automation</a>.
<img src="/images/kanban_blasterhacks.jpg" alt="Our KanBan board near the end of the Hackathon">
If you’ve never heard of–or used a KanBan board, here’s the gist.
There are three buck­ets:
<ol>
<li>To Do.</li>
<li>Doing.</li>
<li>Done.</li>
</ol>
The sec­ond bucket is di­vided up by per­son, so in our case, it was re­ally four sep­a­rate buck­ets.
When some­one needed some­thing new to work on, they would go to the “To Do” bucket and se­lect a new task (which in our case, was a sticky note).
They would place the task into their cor­re­spond­ing “Doing” bucket.
Once the task was done, they would move the sticky note into the “Done” bucket and re­peat.
As a gag, we added an ad­di­tional (superﬂuous) bucket: IDGAF.
If a task was unan­i­mously deemed no longer im­por­tant or rel­e­vant to the pro­ject, that’s where we would put it.
So, we got to work.
We had de­cided to use <a href="https://firebase.google.com/">Firebase</a>, <a href="https://kit.svelte.dev/">SvelteKit</a> and <a href="https://go.dev">Go</a>.
I started set­ting up Firebase, Grant started re­search­ing the no­ti­ﬁ­ca­tion ser­vice, Lukas started work­ing on a cir­cu­lar sta­tus page and Byron started re­search­ing the Camera API.
As I look back at this mo­ment to­day, I re­al­ize some­thing im­por­tant about all of these tasks that ended up ben­e­ﬁt­ing us in the long term: they were all in­de­pen­dent.
None of these orig­i­nal tasks re­lied on any other to get done.
We could work in par­al­lel.
Down the road, this would change, but the fact that we were par­al­lel at the be­gin­ning set us up for suc­cess.
<h2>The Snow and the Crash</h2>
We kept work­ing through the night, down­ing en­ergy drinks and laugh­ing as we worked. We got the im­por­tant ser­vices and UI el­e­ment up and run­ning.
Around mid­night, as my nose had pre­dicted sev­eral hours ear­lier, it started snow­ing.
As the snowﬂakes grew larger and ever more ﬂuffy, I felt the teams en­ergy be­gin to dip.
We were en­coun­ter­ing road­blocks, one-by-one, as our mo­ti­va­tion waned and the threat of sleep be­came more promi­nent.
Then, some­one in the main atrium (who, I don’t re­mem­ber) pro­nounced, “we are go­ing out­side.”
We ran down the halls like chil­dren spread­ing the an­nounce­ment, and soon enough, there were dozens of tired com­puter sci­ence stu­dents throw­ing snow­balls in their jeans the t-shirts.
As I threw (and re­ceived) a num­ber of snow­balls, I re­al­ized some­thing im­por­tant: we were mak­ing an app about tak­ing care of your­self phys­i­cally, but had ne­glected to do so our­selves.
As im­por­tant as the pro­ject may be, it won’t get done when every­one is tired, mus­cles cramped, and un­happy.
To keep the mo­men­tum go­ing, breaks are re­quired.
As we ﬁled back in­side to warm our hands un­der tap wa­ter, I swore to make sure the rest of the team would take care of them­selves–and each other.
<h2>The Conclusion</h2>
The rest of the hackathon was un­event­ful.
We sat at our lap­tops, crank­ing out line af­ter line of code.
We took breaks and slept when we were blocked by other tasks.
Although it was our ﬁrst hackathon, we de­cided to run our pro­ject in the ad­vanced track, nor­mally re­served for hackathon vet­er­ans.
It paid off, be­cause we won sec­ond-place!
Look at us: hag­gard but sat­is­ﬁed.
<img src="/images/secondplace_blasterhacks.png" alt="The team receiving our second-place win.">

What Blasterhacks Taught Me About Leadership

status_of_the_harper_chrome_extension

<h1>The Status of the Harper Chrome Extension</h1>
Elijah! Elijah! When will we have a Chrome ex­ten­sion for <a href="https://writewithharper.com">Harper</a>?
Although it’s usu­ally asked with a bit more panache, this is a ques­tion I’ve got­ten a lot.
In fact, an au­thor at Lifehacker <a href="https://lifehacker.com/tech/harper-offline-alternative-to-grammarly">wrote about it just yes­ter­day</a>.
For the longest time, it was a pro­ject on the back-burner.
Some­thing I in­tended to work on, but was al­ways passed up for more im­por­tant things.
It never saw the light of day.
Until now.
<img src="/images/harper_chrome_ext.png" alt>
<h2>What is Harper?</h2>
&hellip;and why do I need its Chrome ex­ten­sion?
Harper is a gram­mar checker that re­spects your pri­vacy.
All lan­guage pro­cess­ing hap­pens on-de­vice, no mat­ter where you’re us­ing it.
For most of Harper’s his­tory, it has only been avail­able in one of many text ed­i­tors as a plu­gin.
With the Chrome ex­ten­sion, you’ll be able to get high-qual­ity gram­mar check­ing any­where on the web.
<h2>What’s the Status?</h2>
I just marked the <a href="https://github.com/Automattic/harper/pull/1072">Chrome ex­ten­sion PR</a> as “ready for re­view”.
Here’s what that means.
If you’re will­ing to get into the tech­ni­cal bram­bles, you can com­pile and run it your­self.
That will con­tinue to be the case un­til the Chrome Web Store re­views and ap­proves our sub­mis­sion, which could take a cou­ple of weeks.
When in­stalled, it will be en­abled for a cu­rated list of web­site that I’ve per­son­ally re­viewed to con­ﬁrm work well.
If you want to try us­ing the ex­ten­sion on an­other site, you will be able to ad­ven­ture into the world of un­ex­pected be­hav­ior by hit­ting the popup menu.
Importantly, it is work­ing ex­cep­tion­ally well on any site us­ing the Gutenberg ed­i­tor.
I will be back­port­ing a lot of this code to our WordPress plu­gin to im­prove the ex­pe­ri­ence there.
<h3>Will it Support Firefox?</h3>
As the PR stands to­day, the ex­ten­sion does not sup­port Firefox.
I have list of things that should get done whilst wait­ing for the Chrome Web Store to ap­prove the sub­mis­sion.
Fire­fox sup­port is on that list.
<h2>Any Questions?</h2>
If you’ve got ques­tions for me about this, feel free to reach out via <a href="https://discord.com/invite/JBqcAaKrzQ">Discord</a> or on <a href="https://github.com/automattic/harper">GitHub</a>.

An update on the long-awaited Harper Chrome extension, its current state, and what to expect next.

An up­date on the long-awaited Harper Chrome ex­ten­sion, its cur­rent state, and what to ex­pect next.

Elijah Potter

The Status of the Harper Chrome Extension

What is Harper?

What’s the Status?

Will it Support Firefox?

Any Questions?

Other Stuff

The Climate Change Progress Bar

The Books I Read in February and March 2025

What Blasterhacks Taught Me About Leadership