“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
—
Kranzberg’s
First Law
I’m the Technical Lead of the IAU Minor Planet Center at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. I spend most of my time designing and building astrophysical data systems. Underpinning this work is my preoccupation with all of the ways that computers could be revolutionizing science and society — but aren’t yet.
Contact me on Mastodon as @pkgw@mastodon.world or over email at peter@newton.cx. Find out more on my About Me page, or by subscribing to my lightweight newsletter — I use it to send out links to the posts that I write here on this website:
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Latest post:
2025 August 29
The past few posts have been about prep work for my BSSw project: interviews and a survey of tools. After all this throat-clearing, I’m ready to sketch out the resource that I’m actually planning to create!
Recently:
| 2025 August 28 | The State of the Doc Tools |
| 2025 August 22 | The State of the Docs |
| 2025 July 2 | MPC and the Rubin First Look |
| 2025 April 29 | CASA 6 is Now in Conda-forge |