https://devinthakker.com Essays, build logs, and notes on products, engineering, and civic tech. en-us https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-800-cities https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-800-cities The Common News has reached 800 cities representing more than 72 million people, with coverage expected to reach 1,000 cities by the end of the week. Here is what this stage of growth is teaching us about building local civic information at scale. Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/why-i-built-cofinder https://devinthakker.com/blog/why-i-built-cofinder Why I built CoFinder, the problem I saw with existing cofounder discovery, and why I think founder matching should focus on signal, intent, and actual compatibility instead of volume. Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/what-makes-civic-data-hard-to-structure https://devinthakker.com/blog/what-makes-civic-data-hard-to-structure Why local government information is so difficult to organize well, and what I have learned from turning messy agendas, meetings, committees, and local issues into usable product surfaces at The Common News. Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-100-cities https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-100-cities What changed as The Common News expanded to 100 cities serving nearly 42 million people: data quality, city-by-city variation, entity structure, publishing systems, and what scale actually means in local civic information. Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-data-model https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-data-model How I think about the core data model behind The Common News: municipalities, meetings, agendas, summaries, entities, and the relationships that turn messy civic documents into structured product surfaces. Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/local-government-seo-specificity https://devinthakker.com/blog/local-government-seo-specificity Why local government content rarely wins through broad keywords alone, and how entity-rich civic pages, geographic specificity, and structured publishing make long-tail search the real opportunity. Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-ai-summary-trust https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-ai-summary-trust How I approach trust at The Common News: source grounding, scoped summarization, human-readable structure, and product decisions designed to make AI-generated civic coverage more reliable. Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-local-seo-system https://devinthakker.com/blog/common-news-local-seo-system A breakdown of the SEO system I built for The Common News: canonical summary URLs, structured metadata, entity-driven local relevance, server-rendered civic content, and municipality-level internal linking. Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/chicago-budget-rag https://devinthakker.com/blog/chicago-budget-rag A practical build log of creating a public-facing RAG app over large municipal budget PDFs, with source citations, embedded document viewing, quality tuning, and production deployment. Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://devinthakker.com/blog/why-i-built-the-common-news https://devinthakker.com/blog/why-i-built-the-common-news Why I built The Common News, the problem we saw with local government information delivery, and how we are making civic updates easier to follow. Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT