Hello! I'm starting a non-profit local news organization, creating tools for journalists and distributed communities, writing documentation, exploring programming systems, and researching how these practices can benefit each other.

Distributed community apps

I'm done with enabling large corporations by using their cloud services. I think we all should be. It's embarrassing to make that statement on this website. Transitioning even a small community to using offline-friendly, local first apps is challenging. We need this to happen globally.

I hope to work with others to answer questions like:

1. What if we stop using cloud services for everything?
2. How might software play a more personal role?
3. What needs to exist for community computing to be more prevalent than corporate computing?

Documentation & programming systems

Technical writing is weird right now. We can get answers about coding problems from large language models. A lot of people produce technology education content these days, particularly content around software development. Too much of that content is repetitive, narrowly focused, and with short expiration dates.

It's too easy to find irrelevant posts covering outdated versions of software, or posts that do not list the date published or the software version used. It's too easy to find posts that take an extremely narrow view of the problem when they should be assessing the trade-offs of multiple possible solutions.
It's far too easy to find posts by multiple people that basically say the same thing.

I think there are many opportunities to make it easier to learn and be effective with languages, frameworks, and libraries. I'll be exploring that widely.

Local news

This year I'm launching a local news publication for South Puget Sound in Washington State. Recently I've worked part time on this project, starting with a soft launch in early November 2023. The Mima Mercury covers Thurston County, WA and the surrounding area.

I'm taking a data-informed approach to news gathering and a resident focused approach to editorial decision making. This means less time spent on breaking stories and more time spent on projects that provide context and insight; no nasty, intrusive ads, but instead will give readers good reasons to support the work.

Tools for journalism

Previously I've worked on a grant-funded tool for managing the kinds of datasets newsrooms work with regularly. After some time away from that work I'm getting back into it. I'm essentially starting from zero with this work and will be sharing more soon.

This is all part of the same thing

Surface-level programming tutorials aren't much different from poorly-reported local news. Journalists need end-to-end encrypted collaboration tools that are reliable for secure, offline-friendly, local-first use to replace cloud services and startups. When we talk about what makes effective technical documentation it's striking how similar it is to what makes effective civic information.

The Mima Mercury is a local news publication as well as a vehicle for researching the intersection of journalism, distributed networks, documentation, and programming.