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How I Work

After 15+ years building newsroom tools under deadline pressure, I've developed strong opinions about what works.

Principles

Prototypes over presentations

I don't make slide decks about what I'm going to build. I build something small and real within the first week. You can click it, break it, react to it.

Editorial intent first

Before any code: what's the story? What should the reader feel? What action should they take? The visualization serves the journalism, not the other way around.

Stress-test before launch

If it's going live on election night, we simulate election night. Load testing, failure scenarios, fallback plans. The boring stuff that prevents disasters.

Documentation as delivery

You get working code, not a dependency on me. Every project includes documentation your team can actually use after I'm gone.

What I Don't Do

✗Waiting until the end to show you something
✓Working prototype in week one, iterate from there
✗Building what you asked for literally
✓Pushing back when the brief doesn't serve the goal
✗Optimizing for "cool" over "clear"
✓Choosing boring technology that ships reliably
✗Disappearing between check-ins
✓Async updates in Slack/Discord so you always know status

Questions I'll Ask You

Before we write any code, we need clear answers to these:

  1. 1. What happens if this visualization is wrong?
  2. 2. Who's the least technical person who needs to understand this?
  3. 3. What's the one thing this absolutely must communicate?
  4. 4. How does this hold up when the data is ugly or incomplete?
  5. 5. What does success look like in six months, not just at launch?

Typical Timeline

Week 1 Discovery, data audit, first prototype
Week 2-3 Core functionality, design iteration
Week 4-5 Polish, edge cases, stress testing
Week 6+ Launch support, documentation, handoff

Timelines compress or expand based on scope. Election night systems need more stress testing. Investigative pieces need more data wrangling. We figure this out in the discovery call.

If this resonates, let's talk. If it doesn't, we're probably not a fit—and that's fine.

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