Brian Cantoni
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Creating a Tableau Data Pipeline with TSA Passenger Data
Since 2019, the TSA has published daily counts of people screened at U.S. airport checkpoints. I was curious to see how those counts changed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the recovery that followed, so I used the data to build a small, automated path from the TSA’s HTML table to a refreshed Tableau data source, using free tools along the way. →
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MarkEdit Sort Text Extension
I recently discovered MarkEdit, an open-source Markdown and text editor for macOS. It is intentionally minimal and fast, but I missed one small feature: sorting text, either a selection or the entire file. So I wrote an extension to add it. →
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Motivation for Managers: That’s the Job!
One of the motivational phrases I tell myself at work when some aspect of leadership is hard or unpleasant is “That’s the job!” Can a simple line from a Tom Cruise action movie be a useful tool for navigating difficult times at work? Let’s find out. →
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Remote Control: Copilot vs Claude Code
Both GitHub Copilot and Claude Code support remote-control sessions from their mobile apps — meaning you can kick off work on your laptop, walk out the door, and keep supervising the agent from your phone. I tried this with both, and it worked better than I expected. →
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You Can Just Do Things!
“You Can Just Do Things” is a simple idea making the rounds on social media: you don’t need permission to act, build, or create. It’s a reminder to favor doing over overthinking. Lately it’s been showing up everywhere — in Twitter threads, book titles, and at work — and I’ve found it genuinely useful as a personal nudge to take initiative. →
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The Case for “Eventually Consistent” Management
People often panic when two managers give slightly different answers. The instinctive reaction is “something is wrong” or “we’re disjointed.” But in distributed systems, we accept temporary mismatches as a necessary trade-off for speed—a concept known as eventual consistency. Instead of treating every management inconsistency as a failure, what if we viewed leadership teams like distributed databases that sometimes just experience latency before reaching a unified state? →
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Why Feature Reviews Matter (and How We Ran Them at Palm)
At Palm Computing, we worked against hardware manufacturing schedules that made software deadlines absolute. To avoid the dreaded “black box” of development where stakeholders only see the result at the bitter end, we implemented Feature Reviews. These regular check-ins did more than just report status; they forced transparency, mitigated risk, and became a crucial tool I still use with my teams today. →
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A Modern Manager for Browser Bookmarklets
While often overshadowed by full browser extensions, bookmarklets remain a powerful, privacy-friendly tool for automating repetitive web tasks. However, writing and formatting the necessary JavaScript can be tedious. I recently built a simple bookmarklet manager — using AI to speed up the process — that makes creating, identifying, and sharing these scripts much easier. →
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My First Electron App: ImageLinks
I wanted a simple app to extract links from screenshots and used Claude Code to create a simple desktop application that did exactly that. This was my first time creating anything with the Electron cross-platform app platform and it worked quite well. →
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Downsizing My Flickr Library to the Free Tier
My Flickr photos account was a fun snapshot in time when I worked at Yahoo and before mobile phone cameras took over. This week I used AI to create a couple of scripts to help me get back down to the free account limit. Here’s a quick explanation of the process I followed along with a few Flickr memories. →
More posts can be found in the full archive or by exploring the tags. (Stats)
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