Who is Tyler Fisher?
I'm a journalist and software engineer who has worked with prominent national news organizations and solo operations just getting off the ground. Most recently, I was the Chief Technology Officer at The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy. Previously, I was a software engineer at the Washington Post, where I worked on election results infrastructure. I was deputy director at News Catalyst and the director of technology at the Tiny News Collective. I also used to work at Politico and NPR, building election results reporting systems, bespoke visual stories, and newsroom tooling.
But work isn't my life, and I never talk about things I enjoy aside from the errant tweet. I've let my digital life only express the work over the past few years. I want to talk more about the play.
This site is my playground, a personal space to write and explore new ideas. Sometimes it'll be about work. Sometimes it'll be about nu metal. It's free-form and liable to change at any moment. I don't have a publishing schedule. I don't have subscriber goals. I'm not tracking engagement. I'm just riffin', baby.
Knowing myself, I will probably have furious spurts of activity here, and then I'll drop off for months at a time. My topics will vary wildly and without warning. I'll commit to big projects and only do two editions. And I'm fine with that. We all need exploratory spaces. I'm trying to keep this one as low-pressure as possible.
How'd you build this thing?
I wrote a whole blog post about it! And the repo is open source! But here's the short of it: this is a next.js application hosted on Vercel. I manage content in Decap CMS, and I manage media assets in Cloudinary. My newsletter is published via Buttondown.
There's a newsletter. Should I subscribe?
Yeah, if you want! I send all of my posts as individual newsletters as soon as they're published. Right now, there's no difference between posts on the site and what will go in the newsletter. Who knows, maybe that'll change? Fair warning though, my topics and frequency are going to vary wildly. Don't sign up expecting a weekly developer blog.