Hey folks,
I'm Ted Han, lead developer for Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) on DocumentCloud.
I'm a linguist by degree, a software developer by trade and a scifi nerd (well, nerd in general really) by leisure. As someone who came to software development through the side door, I've got strong feelings about the manner in which computer science and software development interact with other trades and fields of study. Part of what grabbed my attention about the world of journalism are the efforts (Knight News Challenge, the Knight/Mozilla Partnership, the ProPublica Nerd Blog, IRE and Sarah Cohen's efforts with Reporters' Lab) that have been made to build tools appropriate to reporter's workflows, and to nudge those workflows towards more convenient/efficient practices.
In short, I'd like to see the best parts of software development – helping users automate boring/tedious tasks – melded further into fields such as journalism.
From the technical side, I largely work on Ruby (including, but not limited to Ruby on Rails) and Javascript projects using Linux distributions like ubuntu. I have a fondness for data modeling and data modeling toolkits.