I took over as the Director of Technology at the Texas Tribune a year ago this month, but if you’re reading this you probably already knew that. What you probably don’t know is that year ago June I had one foot out the door. So what kept me at the Tribune? A beer with Emily Ramshaw. She reminded me why I left the start-up world in the first place: to make a difference in the world with my work.

Most of you who know me have heard me talk about Armstrong, the open-source news platform that I helped create when I first joined the Texas Tribune. I have and continue to talk at length about Armstrong and its future, but I’ve never collected those thoughts into one cohesive document outlining how we got to where we are now, what the current state of the project is, and where I hope to see it go.

Last week I attended the Artifact Conference. It was my first design conference, and I was impressed. The talk lineup was amazing and speakers consistently delivered. The talk that stuck in my head (and not only because it was the last talk I attended) was Dan Rose’s Photoshop’s New Groove. The talk was about using Photoshop while designing for the web. It was the counter balance to all of the random snarky comments on Twitter and so forth about Photoshop and how it should die in a fire (I’m paraphrasing, but just barely) and how you’re not a real web designer if you use Photoshop and so on and so forth.

IANAL, but I like to pretend like I am on the Internets. This past week at NICAR, the discussion of open source licenses came up in one of the evening tracks over a few bourbons, or it might have been wine by that point, but I digress. The general theme: licenses are confusing. I know a little bit about them I’m hoping to shed some light on them for fellow journalisty type developers who are thinking about releasing their code but aren’t sure which license they should use.

Here at the Texas Tribune, we started using a project called django-chunks some time last year. Consider this post a cautionary tale and think long and hard before you start using. We didn’t. We’re paying the price. The Promise django-chunks gives you the ability to inject arbitrary chunks of HTML into any template inside Django. You load up a template tag library, call a templatetag, and you’re off to the races.

Yesterday I attended the Pycon Web Summit and there was a lot of talk about getting new programmers started in Python. I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last year since helping found the Austin Web Python User’s Group and I think I have a solution. Success early, success often One of the key things we need to be able to do is get developers on every platform up and running quickly.

This past week I attend the 2012 IRE conference. Remember all of those #nicar12 tweets you saw from me and few other programmery/journalisty type people? That’s the conference we were all hanging out at. Custom maps were one of the big themes. There were a few TileMill talks and they were all packed. TileMill, for those who aren’t familiar, is a tool that let’s you create custom map tiles–the images that make up maps like Google Maps–so you can have a map that’s entirely unique.

Today I discovered the 99% Invisible podcast on architecture and design. Their latest podcast, Pruitt–Igoe Myth, tackles the problems associated with the Pruitt–Igoe housing project which was built in the 1950s in St. Louis to provide affordable housing in the St. Louis urban core. Due to a variety of reasons, which the podcast explores, it was torn down in the 1970s. From Wikipedia: [Pruitt-Igoe’s] 33 buildings were torn down in the mid-1970s, and the project has become an icon of urban renewal and public-policy planning failure.

Last month I blogged about using Travis CI with Armstrong. Things have been going along fine until the last few weeks. Tests were failing due to network timeouts while talking to PyPI. Never one to take failing tests lightly, I set out to fix it. From local testing, it appeared that there was some sort of selective filtering happening at the server level on PyPI that was causing our tests to fail.

In case you didn’t know, I use computers. A lot. Between working as a programmer, writing books, and the occasional leisure time spent playing on computers, the vast majority of my life is spent with a screen of some sort in front of it. That time means I come across and try a lot of different tools, and some of them actually make my life better. One such tool I’ve started using extensively while writing my latest book is Notability.