My work
Four Al Jazeera journalists — and three others — were killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza this month. We need to talk about that.
I usually only share reporting I’ve done, or topics where I have real expertise. International politics isn’t my beat, so I don’t pretend to have unique insight there. But this is different.
Continue reading The Committee to Protect Journalists reports Israeli forces have killed nearly 200 journalists
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Who do you think has a higher unemployment rate right now—recent college graduates with a philosophy degree or those with a computer science degree?
Yikes: it’s computer science, per the Federal Reserve Bank. It’s part of a massive change I’ve written about.
Continue reading Philosophy or Computer Science: Who Has Higher Unemployment?Will there be more software developers working in the United States next year?
My friend—provocateur, venture capitalist, and debutante—Brian Brackeen says no. I say yes.
Now, Brian isn’t some fool. He’s an investor who backs tech companies. I’m a journalist who covers them. So we’re making a bet out of it. [Update: Amusingly, others are betting on this now too]
Continue reading Will There Be More Software Developers in the U.S. Next Year? I’m Betting Yes.Below are my notes, and video, from the remarks I offered to kickoff the second day of our Technically Builders Conference, which also doubled as the closing of the 15th annual Philly Tech Week. It informed this story we published on Technically. My slides are here.
Starting in 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club was a regular gathering of tech enthusiasts in northern California.
The group was made famous for inspiring Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But hundreds of computer clubs emerged around the country then. The Philadelphia Area Computer Society (PACS), for example, was first organized in spring 1976.
You don’t have to care about a few dozen computer nerds getting together 50 years ago. How they did has shaped the work we do, though, and has a few lessons for our future.
Continue reading Remarks: Tech meetups shape economic mobilityBelow are my notes, and video, from the keynote address I used to kickoff Technically Builders Conference. It informed this story we published on Technically. My slides are here.
Maria Romero has 90 days to find a job — or she gets deported.
In December, the Mexico City native completed her MBA in marketing analytics at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. She’s young, educated, with in-demand skills. The kind of immigrant Americans across the political spectrum say we want.
And yet: Maria is worried. It’s February 2025 when the Technical.ly newsroom first meets her — 30 days left, tick tock tick tock. Higher interest rates have ended the tech hiring boom. Volatility is everywhere. Her STEM degree and F1 visa gives her years to work like any American citizen — no quirky paperwork, not even modest immigrant sponsorship costs. But she’s nervous anti-immigrant rhetoric is making a tough hiring climate worse for her. Forget about paying bills, if she doesn’t get a job she’ll get kicked out of a city, out of a country, that she was ready to call home.
She applies to more than 500 jobs. She does coffee meetings, texts friends, has her story told by a news outlet and responds to inbound outreach. She also keeps on living — she walks her dog, she goes to restaurants she loves.
The thing we do before our life changes forever is almost always mundane.
Continue reading Keynote: The case for storytelling (for entrepreneur-led economic development)A former journalist-coworker of mine emailed me a couple weeks back: Is Musk attempting a coup?
An op-editor at a metro newspaper, she was referring to the bombastic and destructive collusion of the world’s richest man Elon Musk into the Donald Trump-led shock to the federal bureaucracy under the guise of the irreverently named DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency — a boyish reference to a memecoin.
I suppose it’s possible, I wrote her. Instead, what I see in Elon Musk is a kind of arrogance I’ve found in other entrepreneurs. Brilliant in one domain and successful in others, I’ve seen plenty of them storm into some situation truly and genuinely oblivious to how over their head they really are.
Continue reading No, Elon Musk isn’t attempting a coup. He just really thinks he’s that much smarter than everyone else.Rye requires more precise temperature control than corn or barley when being passed through a still to produce a spirit to age into a well-liked whiskey.
Cook corn and barley a bit too hot, and there’s more room for error. Do the same with rye, and you end with a burnt mess.
I wrote about this for Men’s Journal here.
“It’s pretty well known that rye can be tricky to work with,” said Herman Mihalich, the chemical engineer turned founder of Dad’s Hat Rye, “and that ranges from small guys to even bigger guys.”
I got this story idea in my head back in March 2024 when I visited my friend’s small micro-distillery (pictured above), and he shared that without more precise temperature control tools he found rye more difficult than bourbon.
The creator economy may be big, or not. The numbers are somewhat divided because definitions are still evolving.
I took what I did know from covering, living and curating creator campaigns, and gave a keynote on the topic for the Philly Ad Club’s annual conference. They had roughly 150 marketers on site at the cozy innovation space of Independence Blue Cross’s headquarters.
Find my slides here. A rough audio recording of the presentation can be found here (or here).
I published here a piece on Technical.ly informed by this work.
