Jake Lawrence
I make software work inside real organizations.
Ten years in and around local government: two village halls, then court and payments systems deployed into 100+ Illinois municipalities, from legacy data conversion to go-live. This site is where I build in public.
Three things I built
All work
Open data
Ukrainian Frequency
The top 12,000 Ukrainian lemmas ranked over 1.5 billion tokens and joined to a validated CEFR profile, shipped as hashed CC-BY releases, a Python package, a hosted lemmatizer API, and a free course built on the same data.
Product
Heddle
Turns a certifying body's blueprint into an item bank, a weekly curriculum, and student-ready documents, with an assistant that shows what every action will do before it runs. In use for a community college exam-prep program with a 100% pass rate.
Client work
CourtCollect
A review console for a Texas municipal court sending cases to a collections agency: a reviewer clears each flagged case and the agency gets only the cleared ones. Legacy court data mapping, magic-link sign-in, and a PII boundary the tests enforce.
Now
Taking the Ukrainian Frequency study from dataset to product: a hosted lemmatizer, a Python package, and a free course built on the same data. Also reading about how public records systems decide what counts.