Hi.

Against the Grain

In this project, the CQ newsroom wanted to understand legislators who vote against the party line--why do they go "against the grain?" What kinds of votes garner the most dissent? To let people browse through our database of party unity votes, we built this web application in object-oriented Javascript and HTML. As readers move through the data, new panels will open to the right, but they can return to an earlier fork in their search at any time. This interactive was a powerful experiment, not just as a standalone interactive, but also as an exploration of new UI for CQ's extensive (but cumbersome) vote database.

Who Owns the Debt?

As the debt limit debate neared its deadline, my team at CQ produced several graphics on the history of the debate, past attempts to raise the limit, and the composition of the debt in question. In this interactive, built in HTML/JavaScript, we pulled apart the components of the debt to see just what was owed to whom. It was featured, along with its companion, on the front page of the Economist's web site.

Demography is Destiny

As we got better at interactive design, the CQ multimedia team moved to a hybrid approach: using Flash for complicated, cross-browser visuals, while using HTML for everything else. We communicated between the two using ActionScript's ExternalInterface, giving us the best of both worlds. One great example of this approach is our map of age demographics over the past decade, based on a selection of census data. The map is built in Flash for its powerful vector graphics, but clicking on a state transfers data out to be presented in an HTML dialog using our custom JavaScript template functions and jQueryUI.

CQ Economy Tracker

The Economy Tracker was a flagship multimedia production for CQ: an interactive data visualization of more than 40 years of economic data at the national, regional, and state levels, split into 6 indicator sets. Behind the scenes, it communicates with our PostgreSQL database via a custom PHP server, which also allows reporters to easily upload CSV files for data updating. The server scripts expose a simple REST/JSON API, creating a base for other economic data visualizations and mashups, such as this map of post-recession unemployment.

Election 2010

For the 2010 midterm elections, CQ cut back the amount of material in its printed New Member Guide. This became an opportunity to present this much-desired information in interactive form on CQ.com, particularly the committee roster "scratch list" and the state delegations. My team also built new results maps and chamber graphics, all of which were updated live on election night from CQ's database using a combination of Flash and JQuery.

Unpacking the Supreme Court

After Elena Kagan's nomination to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, my team worked with CQ's graphics reporter to create this rich collection of information about the historical court. It includes an interactive table that displays the composition of each court dating back to its creation, a chart of presidential influence through the court, and an interactive graph of the confirmation process for nominees over the last twenty years.

CQ Vote Studies

Each year, CQ does an elaborate vote study for all 535 members of Congress, resulting in scores for their party unity (how often they voted with the leadership) and presidential support (how often they voted with the president's pre-announced positions). These are published in the weekly magazine, and in 2009 they accompanied an article on the rising influence of moderates. For the online audience, I created an interactive component to accompany the story online, allowing readers to explore the data in both tabular and rich graphical format. At the end of 2010, I updated the visualization to be faster, and to support multiple years of data on the same canvas. The most recent version adds data going back to 2002, and provides a more convenient, multi-axis visualization of each year.

Big Fish Unlimited

In 2012, I spent about a year working for Big Fish Games in Seattle on their Big Fish Unlimited streaming service. I rebuilt the MVC framework that supported the site (laying the groundwork for future BFG properties), designed the responsive framework used to present it on any form factor (desktop, tablet, and mobile), and wrote all the JavaScript in AMD modules (a first for Big Fish). The JavaScript made heavy use of pub/sub events, allowing us to decouple the native or plugin layer that did the actual streaming on each device from the display logic on the rest of the page.

NPR News for Android

In my spare time, starting in 2009, I started contributing to NPR's open-source Android client, primarily by splitting the playback function apart from the UI code. This helped lay the groundwork for the 2.0 version of the application, and it makes the application much more Android-friendly for users. Working with NPR and Google on this application was a fantastic learning experience for source control, code review, and mobile application design.

Seattle Central Community College

At CQ, I had often trained journalists as part of my multimedia team, but when my wife and I moved to Seattle I decided to take the next step, and began teaching classes in JavaScript and web development at Seattle Central Community College. As always, teaching others is a great way to really learn a topic yourself, and I've learned quite a bit. I'm also working with the full-time faculty to shape and improve the curriculum for front-end development.

Urban Artistry

As the Director of Interactive Media for Urban Artistry, a non-profit dance company based in Maryland, I'm responsible for our online presence. People interested in UA may be accessing the Internet primarily on mobile devices or older hardware, particularly those who are coming to our events. So when we got a chance to redesign the site for a cleaner, more modern look, I took the opportunity to write a completely custom WordPress theme that is responsive and fast, but still runs effectively in legacy browsers. The look and feel is inspired by our logo, which combines evocative whitespace with a bold red splash.