I’m a writer and editor. I cofounded Salon back in 1995. I served as its first technology editor and all-around Web geek for years, then became managing editor just in time for the dot-com bubble to first over-inflate and then collapse.

In 2003 I began working on a book about software development and its discontents. I took a leave from Salon in 2005 to write it; the result is Dreaming in Code, the subject of this Web site.

I started making Web pages in November 1994 as an editor of the short-lived San Francisco Free Press — an early experiment in Web publishing by the striking Newspaper Guild workers in San Francisco. In early 1995 I posted a prototype of a solo Web magazine called Kludge. I quickly discovered that being a one-person publishing operation was more than I could handle at that point in my, and the Web’s, career, given that I still held down a full-time job at the SF Examiner. As the year progressed I began working with David Talbot and the team he was then pulling together to start Salon. I left the Examiner that fall and helped Salon plan and post its first issue in November 1995.

I’ve been publishing a blog since 2002. Today it’s at Wordyard; before that it lived as part of the Salon Blogs program. Previous to the blog, most of my writing online was at Salon; there’s a full directory listing of my pieces here. Here are some links to previous writing.

I wrote for the San Francisco Examiner from 1986 to 1995, serving first as its theater critic, then as its movie critic and “digital culture” columnist. My theater criticism won the George Jean Nathan prize in 1989. Before Will Hearst brought me to the Examiner I’d written theater, movie and book reviews for the Boston Phoenix. I graduated from Harvard in 1981; I spent the bulk of my time as an undergraduate writing and editing at the Crimson.

Here are some links to some other biographical material:

• Mike Pence’s profile of me for Kuro5hin
• Rebecca Blood’s Bloggers on Blogging interview with me