12 Apr 2025

Hello Hacker News readers! If you like this blog post, you may be interested to know that I’m on the job market. If you or your company is hiring and think I might be a good fit, please be in touch.

A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s. Through a handful of FOIA requests I’d learned that the images had been meticulously digitized and put online for purchase, but that less than 100 pictures had been sold that way — not nearly enough to justify the paywall.

It was a strange rallying call, and certainly feels like it comes from a different era, but (if I may humbly say so) it worked. Within a few months, the National Agricultural Library put their high-resolution scans online, and they remain available to search and download. It’s easy for me to imagine a version of this story where I declared victory and moved on to the next thing.

But that’s not what I did! Now that the images were available, I wanted to add them to Wikimedia Commons. In order to do so, I needed to create some software that would handle the uploads. This was my first ever project in Python, and in many ways, the start of my life as a programmer. The domino effect here is a little mind-boggling for me.

Emboldened by that foray into coding, I created a Twitter bot to post through the collection. Social media bots as a medium became pretty important to me. That account stopped posting when Twitter became X, approximately, but it continues to this day on Bluesky and Mastodon. I found other weird opportunities to highlight the collection. I gave a short talk at the National Archives for Wikicon 2015, made a visualization video for a concert of carnatic music, and added a thousand apple cultivars to my favorite collection of datasets. I made buttons.

Most exciting to me, though, has been seeing the public collection flourish as I’d hoped it would. There has been a coffee table book, an academic exploration, a postcard collection, and high-quality prints from an art seller. The collection continues to get press attention — not just from interviews I did with sites like Mashable and Morsel, but in Open Culture, Atlas Obscura, even a shout-out from the New York Times. Just this year it got a delightful write-up by Kelsey McKinney at Defector, one of my favorites.

I found the pomological watercolors through my advocacy for the public domain — a cause that can sometimes feel a little lonely and dispiriting. Embracing these artworks, though, has changed my life for the better in so many ways over the past decade. I don’t really have a big takeaway, and nobody’s asking for advice, but: I have been so grateful that I kept pulling that string and following my curiosity and interest. I sought out this collection on a lark, and I have now spent ten years surprised and delighted by what I found.