My work
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)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.
Backed by a research project on tech workforce development that I am leading with Technical.ly for our client Accenture, I got the chance to share high-level findings.
Ahead of National Apprenticeship Week, I gave a 10-minute talk, which was broadly about apprenticeships but included a bit of general tech workforce and tech economy basics and some Philadelphia-specific detail. Find the slides here, and a story I wrote on the topic here.
Too often when tech, startup and local economic development leaders I know say they want more “storytelling” about their “ecosystem,” they just mean “I want more people to know about my stuff.” They mean marketing and promotion alone.
But when we evoke the word “storytelling” we need more meaning. All the brain science makes clear, storytelling works when the audience learns something about themselves. With the help of strong data-backing, today storytelling can mean: Using fact-finding and people stories to help a community identify the closest approximation of its truth. It sounds like my old definition journalism.
This idea of marrying data with storytelling for local economic organizers was the focus of a keynote, and subsequent discussion, I led at SuperConnect, the user conference of Baltimore-founded startup Ecomap. It was informed in part by the “ecosystem stack” concept I’m tinkering with.
My slides are here. Earlier this year, I presented a webinar for the firm, and those slides are here.
This was originally a social video here.
That’s Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in an interview last year that’s being resurfaced now that he’s the presumptive Democratic nominee for Vice President. And for good reason, critics are rightly pointing out that he’s flatly wrong when he says (at roughly 3:40 in the video) that free speech doesn’t protect misinformation or hate speech.
Continue reading Free speech guarantees your right to speak, not your right for it to be heard
