Projects; December 2023
Rapid Unscheduled Life Rearrangement
I’m enjoying this bi-yearly perspective taking and note keeping. Often I find myself either completely swamped in all the stuff I want to do and simultaneously feeling like I’ve done absolutely nothing. This past six months was a bit of a detour from what I thought I would be doing, but I did some good and cool stuff.
Stuff Did
Technical Strategy for True Hypermedia
I led a collaborative, cross team effort to outline a full roadmap to address business and technical challenges for the core of Vox Medias content pipeline. This was a small novel about how Vox could become a truly hypermedia company, move faster, and prepare for the coming wave of uncertainty that’s headed for the internet. I worked with amazing designers and product thinkers like Ryan Gantz and Tara Kalmanson, and I’m really proud of the end result. The reception from brass was basically “lol okay we’re going to lay off half your team and migrate to Wordpress” tho, so that led me to my second big project.
Moved to Stockholm
I didn’t really expect Vox Media to go for my plan, so I reached out to a contact at Uppsala Universitet and ultimately accepted a role as a system developer for the Bioinformatics group there.
This ended being an incredibly big project on my end, getting our house ready to rent, finding an apartment in Stockholm (yikes) and moving the whole family over there. We’re still dealing with migration crap, but we’ve largely settled in and Ro and Emile should be starting daycare when I start my new role in January.
This process ended up eating practically all of my time and energy, but I still managed to get a few things I had planned done.
Pushbroom
Pushbroom is largely done! I rebuilt the dashboard app, wrote a ton of docs (tho there are still more to write) and it’s pretty much ready for its first beta users. Just need to get them in the system, finish writing docs, and we’re off to the races. I’ve been using it on my site here and it’s been great.
If your interested in seeing how it works for own projects, drop me a line and I’ll get you in. The whole things is free for now while I figure out what the commodity storage and compute costs me.
An App for the Pluriverse
Part of the technical strategy document for Vox was lots of small prod of concept apps, and working with other engineers and designers to get them set up running my RDF based application baseline. In the process, I got this more or less ready to roll and wrote about how and why it works. It’s good!
Freelancing Again
Between leaving Vox and starting at Uppsala Universitet, I’ve picked up a couple of freelance clients. Crowdalert is a new security startup from someone I’ve worked with before, and Privo Mobile is a dumbphone concept from an old friend from the Esri days. I think both these projects are cool and I’m interested to see where they go.
I’m also working on the client application for Crowdalert, which isn’t something that I can really show off at this point but it’s been really fun to work on. The structure for project management and billing I’ve laid out here before is really working for me and my clients.
What’s Next?
Ideas around Stucco and ActivityPub are still exciting to me, but since my work with Vox was close enough to that world that it was pretty demotivating work on it.
Here in Stockholm, however, I’ve joined a studio space that’s run by an artist collective called Platform and they seem pretty interested in these sorts of ideas. I’m hoping to get Stucco operating as I guess basically a CMS and explore operating a community-first and safety-minded Mastodon instance. I’m hoping to explore ideas around low-tech computing for both these ideas. Is 2024 finally the year I run my own physical server? We’ll see!
Since my studio is first and foremost an art studio I’m excited to get back into an art making practice. This is going to be more traditional prints since I left my Riso with Secret Room in Portland. I am planning on getting a little lateral with Lego brick relief and kitchen-litho tho so it won’t all be straight ahead printmaking.
On the Riso front I’m starting to plan a print exchange I’m calling Small Multiples. I’m hoping to get a good set of folks from Europe and the America’s and put on a couple of shows in Portland and Stockholm.
RDF Is Still Cool
Alongside all of this community building stuff, I’m looking forward to continuing to develop my tool chain and maybe some more libraries for working RDF. Ním and I still have lots more ideas to explore around software, conceptual labor, and how to do both of those things at the same time.
One idea that has been kicking around has been that with RDF describing the shape of your data, and it’s ability to re-contextualize that data into different particulars, you could do things like take a blog and turn it into a videogame. So I did that. And because I can’t do anything without doing everything, I wrote a tool for drawing the art for it.
I hope that all these ideas will start coalescing next year, and I’ll have a bit more time and energy to move my practice forward.