This American Life's Audio Hackathon was last weekend. It was a good time exploring different ways to enhance podcast creation, discovery, and consumption. My team worked on a web app that synchronizes social and multimedia content – photos, ads, tweets, videos, »
The view from my hotel room in BA! Month No. 7 included a trip to Buenos Aires, a workshop, a keynote, a hack week with my fellow fellows, some meetups, a wasted week due to a bad cold (ugh), and »
After the HHBA Media Party, all of us Knight-Mozilla fellows stayed in a Buenos Aires for another week, working on side projects and exploring the city together. I used my "hacking" time to continue working with Snap.svg – my hope »
¡Hola de Buenos Aires! The Hacks/Hackers BA Media Party was held last week at the Ciudad Cultural Konex in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was a super cool event and reminded me, again, that I need to learn how to »
The Sixth Month is over already? For real?? That's baffling. Anyway. I've had a bit of a breakthrough in the last four weeks. I wrote a Source post, gave a solo talk to a 200+ person audience, and finally made »
This is my talk on SVG animation from #NEJSConf in Omaha. You can walk through the presentation slides here. (They're also on GitHub.) Why SVG Today we’re going to talk about SVG. More specifically, we're going to talk about »
The 2015 Fellows met up in Portland, Oregon at the end of July to work on some of our open-source projects. We each brought a colleague from our host newsrooms and had a fabulous time coding things and trying as »
The Knight-Mozilla fellowship is super awesome. If you've ever wanted to work in a newsroom, build cool things, and travel a lot – you should apply. I'm more than halfway through my fellowship now, and it’s neat to look back »
I’ve hit the halfway point. My sentiments: I've started a lot of projects but haven't finished nearly as many. I think that's OK as long as there's still progress. The lack of formal project management processes in the newsroom »
This is a retrospective on a painful project launch. Today, CIR published a big investigation on the nuclear weapons industry. The report includes three interactive graphics: two slippy maps and a timeline of sorts. The launch was far from perfect »
SRCCON was last week, and it was awesome. Good discussion. Good coffee. Good times. I've come to really enjoy these news nerd "reunions" of sorts – it's fun to see everyone I don't get to work with on a daily basis »
OpenNews brought all of us Knight-Mozilla fellows to Minneapolis a day early for a low-key, pre-SRCCON hack day. The theme of the event was "Quant Selfish," so the goal was to make something out of personal data related to whichever »
Month No. 4 was busy...and pretty decent overall. I had a few graphics published on revealnews.org. I attended a couple great conferences. I mentored some people. Another one of my session proposals was accepted. AND I started building »
Select session notes from Google I/O 2015. Keynote (Watch) Android M App Permissions – You can choose which permissions you can agree to. Defers asking until the point in the UX process when the permission is needed. Chrome Custom Tabs »
I spent a couple days in DC last week so I could attend Visualized: Political Data, a one-day conference dedicated to exploring data visualizations in the context of political science, political campaigns, and political journalism. I felt conflicted about flying »
I can hardly believe it: I stayed in California the entire month. Fellowship Month No. 3 was mostly solid time in the office, which was a nice change of pace from the long conferences in March and April. Here's what »
CONFERENCE NOTE DUMP! YEAH! My commentary is in italics. Updates are ongoing. Steve Souders: Design + Performance @souders Tricks to marry design and performance: Create small interdisciplinary teams. Bring all players into the mix early in the process Define guiding principles. »
I'm two months in. To be honest, I’ve been feeling a bit scattered lately. Progress on the style guide project has been slow since I’ve been busy with travel and other projects. I’ve been starting too much »
I spent last week in Washington, D.C., at #SNDMakes, a “boutique prototyping event” sponsored by the Society for News Design. I was lucky enough to be one of 60 designers, developers, and visual storytellers from newsrooms around the country »
This is my (essentially verbatim) lightning talk on Designing for Performance from #SNDMakes DC. Designing for Performance Hi, I’m going to chat for a minute about Designing for Performance – or as I like to call it: Keeping People Happy. »
I've just wrapped up the first month (plus a week, because I'm slow) of my fellowship at the Center for Investigative Reporting. It has been grand. I've been working on a variety of projects – some for the newsroom, some for »
This is Part 2 of my thoughts on NICAR 2015. If you want to read about specific sessions, see Part 1. During NICAR, I took some mental notes of topics that I thought deserved additional attention from the “news nerd” »
NICAR 2015 was fantastic. I liked the way the conference was organized. I liked the variety and quality of sessions offered. And I really liked meeting all sorts of awesome people over those five days. So #NICAR15 is cool. Super »
Last August, I was sharing a bottle of wine with the amazing Dr. Carol Zuegner, my friend and former j-school advisor, as we discussed how my newish job was going. I was working as a web developer for a small »