A post-mortem of my KOReader patch for Entity Footnotes, the "no" that reshaped it, and why solving it right meant not touching the plugin at all.
Duccio Mondanelli — Writing
Case studies and field notes on the operational side of teacher apprenticeship programs, special education licensure, and program systems design.
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Teaching an app to read a receipt
A post-mortem on a self-hosted PWA that turns a photographed receipt into a split YNAB transaction using AI vision, and why the fix for drifting grocery categories turned out to be the same fix behind our program data rebuild.
Rebuilding program data infrastructure with AI
Two years of overlapping spreadsheets drifted out of sync until nobody could agree on our own candidate count. How a three-dashboard architecture and AI-assisted reconciliation made the data trustworthy again, and the two rules that keep it that way.
Building a librarian who actually knows my taste
A post-mortem on a self-hosted app that turns my Hardcover reading history into individualized, AI-generated book recommendations, verified against real catalog data, and why the build kept echoing the individualized-pathway work I do at NXT GEN Teach.
WIP - Designing quarterly progress reports that actually align to licensure standards
Most apprenticeship progress reports are generic by default and less than useful by consequence. How we rebuilt ours around the actual licensure standards for two different special education tracks, and why one form for two programs was the original mistake.
We Need Communities, Not Heroes
On Justin Reich's "Failure to Disrupt": why lasting change in education comes from the slow work of communities, not from the next disruptor or killer app.
Failure to Disrupt: Beware of the Hype Men
What MOOC completion rates and the edtech Matthew effect reveal about who online learning actually serves, and who it leaves behind.
From Hornbooks to LLMs
A brief look at Ed Tech as an accessibility tool, from the 18th-century hornbook to AI tutors, and why the tools were never the point.