What It Is I Do
Trying to make the Internet a more humane place to work and live.
My career has focused almost entirely on building professional tools for open web applications – from writing web-developer focused libraries, SDKs, and documentation for Esri to leading the Content Management System team for Vox Media. I’ve always focused my day job on how we can make the Internet better for the people who have to make their living there. I strongly believe that the open web is a powerful and productive tool for industry and society, and have worked to make my corners of it better for everyone.
Alongside this, I’ve worked for over a decade in my spare time to understand how the web can be used to foster human connection and humane experiences and interactions with each other and our machines. For me this has looked like writing games1 and tools for games2, writing and exploring issues around ethics3, complexity4, and leadership5, understanding digital privacy6 and how we can collect web analytics differently7, and accidentally independently inventing Solid in my search for a more just internet8.
Most recently, I’ve been exploring what the slowest possible social media network could look like – using tools that we’ve had forever and have grown stale. Boring tools, but exploring new and exciting directions. This has meant using the Resource Description Framework9 and RSS to bring hashtags to the open web, allowing anyone with a website to develop subjects and topics alongside the rest of their communities10. We call it Octothorpes11.
I love to read technical specifications, documentation, and legal documents (which I think of as technical specifications and documentations for societies) to understand the richness and complexity of the world, and how simple acts of medium design12 can change the course of the status quo.
I hope to dedicate my full time vocation and energy to building the tools that we need today to write the internet that we need tomorrow. I’m interesting in understanding and working to solve questions around how we can find each other on todays web, how we can support each other, and how we can use the web to help us thrive and support our creative and business endeavors instead of being grist to the mill of the surveillance/advertisement system.
Maybe I can do this with you.
- https://nikolas.ws/joseki-party↩
- https://www.dicegraph.com/↩
- https://nikolas.ws/an-ethical-web-development/↩
- https://nikolas.ws/complex-things-are-complicated/↩
- https://nikolas.ws/what-are-leaders-for/↩
- https://pushbroom.co/ethical-understanding↩
- https://pushbroom.co/↩
- https://nikolas.ws/soft-apps/↩
- https://nikolas.ws/rdf/↩
- https://nikolas.ws/hashtags-for-blogposts/↩
- https://octothorp.es↩
- https://nikolas.ws/medium-design/↩