Mile
Zero

On Monday, I'll be joining the Seattle Times as a newsroom web developer, working with the editorial staff on data journalism and web projects there. It's a great opportunity, and I'm thrilled to be making the shift. I'm also sad to be leaving ArenaNet, where I've worked for almost two years.

While at ArenaNet, I never really got to work on the kinds of big-data projects that drew me to the company, but that doesn't mean my time here was a loss. I had my hands in almost every guildwars2.com product, ranging from the account site to the leaderboards to the main marketing site. I contributed to a rewrite of some of the in-game web UI as a cutting-edge single-page application, which will go out later this year and looks tremendously exciting. A short period as the interim team lead gave me a deep appreciation for our build system and server setup, which I fully intend to carry forward. And as a part of the basecamp team, I got to build a data query tool that incorporated heatmapping and WebGL graphing, which served as a testbed for a bunch of experimental techniques.

I also learned a tremendous amount about development in this job. It's possible to argue that ArenaNet is as much a web company as it is a game company, with a high level of quality in both. ArenaNet's web team is an (almost) all-JavaScript shop, and hires brilliant specialists in the language to write full-stack web apps. It's hard to think of another place where I'd have a chance to work with other people who know as much about the web ecosystem, and where I'd be exposed to really interesting code on a daily basis. The conversations I had here were often both infuriating and educational, in the way the best programming discussions should be.

Still, at heart, I'm not a coder: I'm a journalist who publishes with code. When we moved to Seattle in late 2011, I figured that I'd never get the chance to work in a newsroom again: the Times wasn't hiring for my skill set, and there aren't a lot of other opportunities in the area. But I kept my hand in wherever possible, and when the Times' news apps editor took a job in New York, I put out some feelers to see if they were looking for a replacement.

This position is a new one for the Times — they've never had a developer embedded in their newsroom before. Of course, that's familiar territory for me, since it's much the same situation I was in at CQ when I was hired to be a multimedia producer even though no-one there had a firm idea of what "multimedia" meant, and that ended up as one of the best jobs I've ever had. The Seattle Times is another chance to figure out how embedded data journalism can work effectively in a newsroom, but this time at a local paper instead of a political trade publication: covering a wider range of issues across a bigger geographic area, all under a new kind of deadline pressure. I can't wait to meet the challenge.