portfolio

The Cairo
- Documents
- Spreadsheets
- Wiki
- Garden
- Apartment
eCFR Analyzer
Quorum Analytics
3x4 Font
- ascii
- extended
Mozillazine
Wiki
- faces
Blog
Weather Maps
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
- LEAV
- LEAV-EM
Homepages
- johnduncan.io
- cs.gettysburg.edu
MessageFaces
Classic Macintosh Fonts
Platinum
Orthodox
Poker Squares
Playing Cards
- Skat (Kare)
- Skat (XSol)
Red Light Race
Gettysburg Monuments Map
Desktops
- macOS
- Windows

The Cairo

2023–2025

Documents

Spreadsheets

Budget
- Drafted proposed '26 budget for The Cairo's $1m+/year Association budget.
- Scraped, centralized, and hyperlinked all itemized transaction history for each income/expense line items from Vantaca portal.
Pepco Audit
- Centralized data from four years of Pepco electricity invoices, audited payments charged by management to Association unit owners compared to amount billed by Pepco, and identified disrepancies in billing due to revised bills from meter reporting errors.
Projects
- Compiled spreadsheet of all major building projects, proposals, and initiatives related to improvements, beautification, and BEPS energy compliance.
Management
- Researched, discovered, interviewed, negotiated, and hired new management company.
  - Audited all management companies used by condos and co-ops in Kalorama and Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.
  - Performed novel legal work, identifying over a dozen problematic stipulations in proposed contract.
  - Saved Association $6,500/year by finding discrepancy between initial management proposal and final contract.

Wiki

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/thecairo/wiki/

BEPS
- Discovered and promulgated proposed Building Energy Performance Standards (BEPS) compliance delay from 2026 to 2032 — which was buried in Mayor Bowser's draft FY '26 budget — to board and wider community members.
history
- Compiled and centralized historical research through the DC Historical Society, Library of Congress, DC Government Websites, eBay, and other digital and physical resources.
lawsuits
- Discovered and disclosed existence of a lawsuit, whose subpoena was delivered in March 2025, but never acknowledged by building management company.
submetering
- Compiled the most exhaustive repository of legal, regulatory, policy, technical, and environmental research into the practice of electrical submetering in Washington, D.C.
water
- Discovered obscure documentation of DC Water cooling tower meter sewer credit, per remark buried in 2025 building energy audit from Steven Winter Associates
pepco
- Discovered Pepco master 265v HVAC meter under-reported by 100% for 11 months between 2023–2024.
- Performed novel legal research, discovering that Pepco illegally charged building 100% of the deficiency in November 2024 revised bill. Pepco's DC General Terms & Conditions state
  "[Pepco] may [only] charge the Customer's account an amount equal to one-half of the deficiency in billing for the 12-month period immediately preceding the date of discovery of the meter error."

Garden

Apartment

eCFR Analyzer

February 2025

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/ecfr-analyzer

https://ecfr-analyzer-chi.vercel.app/

https://www.ecfr.gov/

On February 10th 2025, over the course of a 24-hour period, I wrote an Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR) Analyzer which:

Scrapes titles, agencies, and related CFR references from the eCFR into a PostgreSQL database.
Parses out the truncated text subset — title, subtitle, chapter, subchapter, part, subpart, or section — from the full title xml associated with an agency and its children (as specified in the eCFR API's agencies.json CFR references) and saves it to the associated CFR reference.
Calculates the total agency wordcounts from the truncated text subsets of their related CFR references.
Displays the information in three separate frontend views:

Stack

Database: PostgreSQL in Supabase
Backend: Django REST API
- Package Manager: uv
- Runtime: uv for Python/Django
- Linting: Ruff
Frontend: Next.js/React with TypeScript
- Package Manager: Bun
- Runtime: Bun for Next.js
- Linting: Biome.js for Next.js/TypeScript
- Component Library: shadcn
- Style: tailwind
Deployment: Railway (backend) and Vercel (frontend)
Visualization: Highcharts
Features efficient data fetching and caching strategies

Devops

Django Management Commands

Backend

Django REST API backend deployed to https://ecfr-analyzer-production.up.railway.app/api/ through Railway

Frontend

Next.js/React with TypeScript frontend deployed to https://ecfr-analyzer-chi.vercel.app/ through Vercel

Database

PostgreSQL database through Supabase

Sources

Code of Federal Regulations (ECFR)
- Used to scrape 2024 data and to display 2010-2023 historical data through /api/versioner/v1/full/{date}/title-{title}.xml endpoint in Title Compare feature
https://www.ecfr.gov/api/admin/v1/agencies.json
Federal Register
Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)
- Unused, bulk 2010-2023 data

Schema

Agency Word Counts

Agency CFR Titles & Text

Historical Title Changes

Between 2018–2024, I wrote and launched many flagship products and features for Quorum Analytics — the industry leading public affairs platform — helping drive growth from $9M to $64M+ ARR, scale the development team from 12 to 120+, and grow the company from a small bootstrapped startup to serving trade associations, advocacy groups, embassies, nonprofits, congressional offices, government agencies, over 50% of the Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, and 2,000+ clients globally.

As a player/coach technical lead, I mentored and served as a resource to dozens of engineers, managers, engineering directors, and the CTO, consistently solving the team's most complex engineering challenges and establishing Quorum as the best-in-class B2B SaaS software platform in the civic tech industry.

As a technical lead and full-stack senior software engineer, I built many of Quorum's flagship features, consistently solved the team's most complex engineering challenges, and led cross-functional projects in collection, organization, and presentation of legislative, regulatory, compliance, financial, geospatial, and user-generated datasets on the platform.

Some major projects I wrote or led include PAC Hybrid, Quorum PAC, Search UI/UX, Dashboards, Transcripts, Bulk Actions, International, Regulations, and Search.

I wrote Quorum's design system and a majority of the site's initial interface with plain CSS, Stylus, Styled Components, and Mantine.

PAC Hybrid

Quorum PAC

Business Wire: Quorum Launches New PAC Product, Largest Development in PAC Software in Over a Decade

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/quorum-analytics-inc-_quorum-pac-software-launch-activity-7035988341732859904-pt4_/

In July 2022-2024, I designed and implemented core portions of the full-stack infrastructure for the Quorum PAC FEC reporting platform, a greenfield project expanding Quorum's business into the $15M+ PAC software market and helping clients remain compliant, raise funds, and report results to the FEC.

Over the course of the project, I wrote the:

full-stack search and dashboard infrastructure
FEC submission microservice using the Federal Election Commission's (FEC) VenPak: FECLoad 8.3, FECCheck 8.4, and FECPrint 8.4
forms for state political committees and check processing
charity matching infrastructure and frontend

Search UI/UX

In 2021, I designed and implemented visual and functional enhancements for Quorum’s search feature, the default homepage for all users. As technical lead, I mentored two apprentice engineers transitioning from non-engineering careers by providing constant guidance and facilitating their technical growth as a player/coach focused on collaborative problem solving.

Wrote the project technical design document (TDD) and collaborated closely with the product and design teams on the products requirements document (PRD).
Wrote and integrated metadata search feature, which searches through the current dataset's search filters by their name, current value, placeholder text, or filter options.
Wrote and integrated novel ordering system, enabling users to sort 15 datasets in ascending or descending order by 27 unique database columns
- Attachments
  - Added
- Amendments
  - Number
  - Introduced
- Bills
  - Alphanumeric
  - Numeric
  - Current Status Date
  - Introduced Date
- Dockets
  - Created
- Documents
  - Datetime
- Events
  - When
  - Created
- News
  - Date
- Notes
  - Date
  - Created
- Organizations
  - Created
  - Updated
  - Name Weighted
  - Name
- Regulations
  - Detailed Status Date
  - Detailed Status Date Id
  - Proposal Date
- Sent Emails (past 12 months)
  - Sent
- Sent Emails (beyond 12 months)
  - Archived Sent
- Sent SMS
  - Sent
- Supporters
  - Created
  - Updated
- Votes
  - Created
Redesigned and rewrote global search popdown, allowing seamless search to 37 datasets from any feature or location throughout every feature in Quorum
Designed and wrote reusable design system components with the apprentices

Dashboards

https://www.quorum.us/solutions/reporting/

https://www.quorum.us/blog/public-affairs-dashboards/

https://www.quorum.us/blog/interactive-dashboard-covid-19-and-social-media-in-congress-covid/

In 2020, I designed and developed an industry-first full-stack Dashboard feature which visualizes public affairs data through an intuitive, simple, and powerful react-grid-layout interface. The Dashboards feature enables analysis, filtering, and grouping of key metrics and performance indicators, centralizing information for tracking progress, identifying trends, and evaluating performance benchmarks accross most datasets and site features.

As project technical lead, I:

Wrote the project technical design document (TDD) and collaborated closely with the product and design teams on the products requirements document (PRD).
Wrote entirety of frontend and backend infrastructure, including core dashboard component in react-grid-layout and all widget, widget edit form, dashboard, and dashboard header frontend components.
Designed and implemented 9 widget types — List, Calendar Events, Number, Text, Visualization, Quicklink, Favorite Searches, Recent Searches, Trending Topics — to address diverse user needs.
Wrote 73 Django SQL query methods spanning 25 datasets for complex column, date, and sum grouping for visualizations.
Created portable D3 visualization components for Bar, Pie, Line, and Map widgets utilized in dashboards and other Quorum features, such as search dataset visualizations and official district maps.
Engineered a novel data shaper system with team for efficient data querying, filtering, generation, storage, serialization, and caching.
Identified and resolved critical bugs in Chromium URI parsing and react-grid-layout to enhance dashboard performance.

Transcripts

https://www.quorum.us/solutions/legislative-tracking/

https://www.quorum.us/products/federal/

https://www.quorum.us/products/state/

https://www.quorum.us/solutions/government/

https://www.quorum.us/blog/new-product-updates-in-quorum-in-2022/

In 2019, I wrote the front-end for the Committee and Presidential Transcripts feature, enabling users to read, search, download, and visualize transcripts of congressional hearings and presidential speeches within an hour of their completion.

Implemented bidirectional synchronization between video and individual transcript statements, including auto-scrolling and highlighting of relevant transcript statements during both video playback & manual scrubbing and updating the video to relevant timestamp when a specific transcript statement is clicked.
Designed and built a committee profile overview page which included rewriting a non-performant API endpoint using a novel Django QueryMethod to support arbitrary ordering of rows by their column's related enum attributes, significantly improving performance and scalability by returning all ordered rows at once instead of 4 paginated rows.

Bulk Actions

Zendesk: Bulk Actions

Designed and implemented a full-stack Bulk Action feature enabling users to select, create, update, or delete up to 1 million rows at once across 13 action types in 17 datasets

Delivered 13 extensively tested bulk actions, supporting high-efficiency client data processing and mutation with no reported bugs since launch in 2018. Researched and optimized batch updates using Django ORM and raw SQL, culminating in exclusively O(1) SQL UPDATEs for scalable performanceand enhancing user productivity by enabling seamless, large-scale updates in a single operation.

Bulk actions fire either synchronously on the EC2 (now kubernetes) production instance or are queued up to run on the Quorum asynchrous instance if execution is estimated to take longer than 120 seconds according to a heuristic which analyzes the current dataset and action being run.

Action Types:

Set Stance
Set Priority
Archive
Approve
Assign
Set Custom Field
Set Issue

Set Permissions
Set Organization
Merge
Unsuppress
Set External Contact
Set Alignment

Datasets:

Official
Staffer
EU Officials and Staff
Press Contact
Bill
Document
Regulation Document
Supporter

Public Organization
Note
Grassroots Action
Event
Vote
Regulation
Issue Management
Article

International

Regulations

https://www.quorum.us/solutions/regulatory-tracking/

In 2018, I wrote the front-end search and profile for the regulations feature, which gives clients access to comprehensive state and federal regulatory data and tracking tools. Wrote three new datasets—Regulation, Regulation Comment, Docket, and Regulation Document—dozens of filters and QueryMethods, added support for realtime email alerts, lists, and downloads, and added the ability to set stance, priorities, and issues. I rewrote the existing static federal Bill timeline to support dynamic state/federal Regulation timelines and support for any other datasets with arbitrary timelines in the future.

Search

reactify.jsx

3x4 Font

November 2017

ascii

extended

Mozillazine

September 2017

Wiki

April 2017

Faces

Blog

March 2017

Weather Maps

September 2016

MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Summer 2016

https://www.ll.mit.edu/

http://www.ll.mit.edu/employment/division4.html

http://www.ll.mit.edu/employment/division4.html#gp44

In Summer 2016, I designed and built an Android application for Local Evacuation Alert Verification (LEAV) and a JavaScript LEAV web module integration for HURREVAC-eXtended (HVX) during my research internship with the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL).

LEAV is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate and HVX is sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Received sponsorship for TS/SCI clearance and a return offer, which I declined to instead join Quorum as an early engineer.

LEAV

LEAV-EM

Homepages

Spring 2016–Present

johnduncan.io
2024–Present

https://johnduncan.io/

In 2024, I redesigned my homepage, drawing design inspiration from:

Renée French's old homepage from 2001–2017
Susan Kare's old homepages from 1998 and 2001.
Andrew Gerrand's homepage

I ported catclock to JavaScript, taking inspiration from its original C implementations — X10, OpenBSD, and Plan 9.

Catclock is originally an X10 program by Tony Della Fera (MIT-Athena, Digital Equipment Corporation), Dave Mankins (MIT-Athena, BBN), Ed Moy (UC Berkeley), Deanna Hohn (Digital Equipment Corporation), and Philip Schneider (Digital Equipment Corporation), crafted for entertainment in 1988–1989.

Catclock was ported to the Plan 9 operating system by Tom Duff (Bell Labs).

Catclock was rewritten in Tal and ported to uxn by Devine Lu Linvega in collaboration with Rekka Bellum as designer.

cs.gettysburg.edu
2016–2024

7-day Weather Forecast

Color Cycling Landscapes

Weather Landscapes

Picons

MessageFaces

March 2016

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/messagefaces

http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/messagefaces/

In March 2016, I ported and expanded MessageFaces—a legacy Mozilla Suite mailnews XUL/XPCOM extension which displays ‘face’ avatar images which are intended to represent the sender in the form of photos, headshots, cartoons, logos, picons, etc. and originally written by Jens Bannmann in 2004—to the latest version of SeaMonkey.

The extension had been broken for years due to changes in Mozilla's MailNews API, so I fixed the issues and restored compatibility with the latest versions of SeaMonkey and Thunderbird. However, support for Thunderbird was later deprecated and disabled following the removal of XUL overlays in Thunderbird 78.

MessageFaces displays an X-Face—a compressed 1-bit ascii image format originally written by James Ashton—or a Face—a base64 encoded png originally specified by Lars M. Ingebrigtsen—either of which can be embedded within the message header section of email or usenet newsgroup messages. Additionally, MessageFaces supports address book icons, gravatars, and Steve Kinzler's picons.

MessageFaces is a spiritual successor to Rob Pike and Dave Presotto's Vismon from Plan 9 from Bell Labs, Chris Liebman's xfaces, Rich Burridge's faces, Steve Kinzler's Picons, and NeXT Computer's NeXTMail.

Some of my contributions include:

multiple header photos
gravatar icons with caching
decodes X-Face to png instead of legacy bmp (from mnenhy)
local and online picon database with caching
custom mailnews column
Thunderbird 3+ address book contact photo
extensive performance improvements
complete internal infrastructure rewrite

You can create your own X-Face using Jeff Dairiki's Online X-Face Converter

newscheck

mailcheck

Picons

Classic Macintosh Fonts

February 2016

Mac OS Pre-Releases

Sony 6.9

Sony 7.0

0.97

Twiggy

Mac OS 1-6

Mac OS 7.5 (eworld)

Mac OS Misc

Mac OS 9

macOS (OS X)

Server 1.0

Platinum

January 2016

Normal

Hover

Disabled

Pressed

Small

Hover

Disabled

Pressed

Orthodox

Winter 2015–2017

Navigator

Chatzilla

Mailnews

Notifications

Icons

Old Addon Manager

Poker Squares

March 2015–Spring 2016

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/pokersquares

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.gettysburg.pokersquares

From March 2015 to Spring 2016, I designed and wrote an Android application to play Poker Squares—a solitaire-based card game where the player attempts to create the best poker hand in vertical and horizontal rows and columns on a 5x5 grid—as side project for the Gettysburg club chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

PokerSquares uses an expectimax Native Abstract Reinforcement Learning (NARL) Artificial Intelligence opponent AI player created by my academic advisor Dr. Todd W. Neller.

Four color poker card deck adapted from Susan Kare's Windows 3.0 Solitaire playing cards set from 1988, as detailed in the Playing Cards portfolio entry below.

Published to the Google Play Store in September 2016 and has accrued over 1k+ downloads with an average rating of 5 stars.

Playing Cards

Fall 2015–Spring 2016

Skat (Kare)

Skat (XSol)

Gettysburg Monuments Map

Summer 2015

Red Light Race

Fall 2013

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/redlight

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.gettysburg.redlight&hl=en_US

In Fall 2013, I designed and wrote an Android application to play Red Light Race — a jeopardy chip/card game by Dr. Todd W. Neller and based on the Gamewright jeopardy card game Fowl Play which is, in turn, based on the folk jeopardy dice game Pig — for my freshman year cs112 course at Gettysburg College.

RedLightRace uses an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) opponent AI player created by my academic advisor Dr. Todd W. Neller and Marcin Malec (‘13) from Gettysburg College.

Published to the Google Play Store in May 2014 and has accrued over 1k+ downloads with an average rating of 5 stars.

I was featured on the Gettysburg College homepage.

Desktops

2011–2016

macOS

Windows



Copyright © John D. Duncan, III 2011–2025. All Rights Reserved.
Navigator Icons Copyright © Susan Kare, 1998–2001. All Rights Reserved.
Tonal Drawing Copyright © Renée French. All Rights Reserved.
Macintosh Fonts Copyright © Susan Kare, Apple Computer, 1983–1984.
Solitaire Cards Copyright © Susan Kare, Microsoft Corporation, 1988.
Catclock Copyright ©
	Tony Della Fera (MIT-Athena, Digital Equipment Corporation)
	Dave Mankins (MIT-Athena, BBN)
	Ed Moy (UC Berkeley)
	Deanna Hohn (Digital Equipment Corporation)
	Philip Schneider (Digital Equipment Corporation)
	Tom Duff (Bell Labs)
Pin icon Copyright ©
	Apple Computer, “Art Bits” HyperCard 1.0.1–2.1, 1987–1991.
	As featured in Anthony Thyssen's WWW Images and aicons.
Coldsteel border Copyright ©
	Ken Lynch (oroborus 2.0.20, cvs, GPLv2)
	Stefan Pfetzing (oroborus 2.0.20, cvs, GPLv2)
	xfwm-themes 4.6 (git, GPLv2)
Animated border ©
	fauux (thaer.no)

Documents

Spreadsheets

Wiki

Garden

Apartment

Schema

Agency Word Counts

Agency CFR Titles & Text

Historical Title Changes

PAC Hybrid

Quorum PAC

Search UI/UX

Dashboards

Transcripts

Bulk Actions

International

Regulations

Search

reactify.jsx

Faces

LEAV

LEAV-EM

johnduncan.io2024–Present

cs.gettysburg.edu2016–2024

7-day Weather Forecast

Color Cycling Landscapes

Weather Landscapes

Picons

newscheck

mailcheck

Picons

Mac OS Pre-Releases

Sony 6.9

Sony 7.0

0.97

Twiggy

Mac OS 1-6

Mac OS 7.5 (eworld)

Mac OS Misc

Mac OS 9

macOS (OS X)

Server 1.0

Normal

Hover

Disabled

Pressed

Small

Hover

Disabled

Pressed

Navigator

Chatzilla

Mailnews

Notifications

Icons

Old Addon Manager

macOS

Windows

johnduncan.io
2024–Present

cs.gettysburg.edu
2016–2024