James O'Claire

I’ve always been a big fan of installing Python from source.

This has been one of my biggest annoyances working with Python and pip when dealing with projects where that are not meant to be installed as a package, how do you handle dependencies?

We all know that moving to LLMs and agents has caused the feeling of losing touch with parts, or maybe even all, of a code base.

When Yeeun Jo, a student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) contacted me in 2025 to ask about data tracking in app advertisements related to women’s health and pregnancy I was a bit skeptical.

Today I was setting up Hermes to see how it does with web research.

AppGoblin lets any user, from anywhere, request to scan any mobile app for the SDKs, trackers and API calls the app makes.

Google, Meta and the unlikely addition of Mozilla are teaming up to work on a browser W3 specification that would add browser user agent features to track impression, click data and ‘conversion’ data.

When SensorTower acquired AppMagic earlier this week it got me thinking about why.

I decided to check AppGoblin to see how many apps LiveRamp had when Publicis acquired it for $2b, the answer seems to be ~300 mobile apps out of the top 200k apps.

The 2026 Q1 App Ecosystem Report is here with a special section for those attending MAU in Vegas this week.