“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:
“Generic” Artifacts in GitHub Packages
2025 April 3
Service blogging today! For a while I’ve been pondering if it would be possible to use the GitHub Packages service to host “generic” files: namely, arbitrary binary artifacts that aren’t necessarily NPM packages, Docker images, etc. Motivated by some of the my current MPC projects, I sat down this week to look into the topic more deeply than I have before. Lo and behold, you can do this! And it isn’t even (that big of) a hack.
Recently:
| 2025 March 21 | The MPC is Hiring |
| 2025 March 5 | Fun with Databases |
| 2025 February 1 | DASCH DR7 on ArXiv |
| 2025 January 22 | DASCH Data Release 7 |