Summer 2022 Shipping Log: an album, an investigative piece and a web dev curriculum

Wrapping up loose ends and exploring new ones

Hi friends! It’s been three quarters of a year since the last post on this Substack. I find myself caring less about it, both because I’m trying detach myself from defining my experiences and growth in terms of what I “ship” and because I have other channels (namely Updately and Postulate) through which I’ve been recording and sharing reflections.

Nevertheless, I love building things and still find it enjoyable to look back on what I’ve put out in the world. So, from a place of joy, here are five things I shipped this summer (and three from the spring since I missed that shipping log).

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1. a journalism indoctrination

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

In top journalism award panels, judges of color still find themselves the only member of their race or ethnicity in the room. our @aajavoices investigation into judge diversity, selection + impact on who receives journalism's highest honors:

aajavoices.orgVoices Investigation: Journalism’s top awards lack diverse judges - Voices Los Angeles 2022The first Asian American ever elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board was Viet Thanh Nguyen. His achievement was groundbreaking — the first Asian American voting member on the final panel that chooses Pulitzer Prize winners. But he remains alone. Nguyen’s election came only in 2020, more than a century…

Earlier this year I was selected for the Asian American Journalists Association’s student fellowship, Voices.

With a five-person investigative team and three mentors, we reached out to the 66 final judges of the Pulitzers prizes and Peabody, Livingston and Loeb Awards, finding only sole members of several races and ethnicites on every board.

We also got insightful commentary from prize insiders and outsiders on the effects of judge diversity (and lack thereof) on the industry.

The piece was eventually presented at the AAJA convention in LA, which I got to attend for the first time, soaking up the community strength from speeches by Helen Zia and Michelle Ye Hee Lee. The story caught the attention of several big journalism names, and was republished by The Objective.

I learned a lot about journalism from the project:

1. How to get responses with honey, vinegar and persistence. Honey: “we’d greatly value your perspective.” Vinegar: “respond to us or else.” Persistence: multiple phone calls a day, scheduled emails at different times, PR contacts, spreadsheets upon spreadsheets.

2. How to really focus down a (data) story. Bar graph of percentage POC? Too ambiguous, even if there’s explanation right under. Make sure you know exactly what you’re saying, and make every sentence, section and graphic “airtight.”

3. What it feels like to have data editors. Moving legends around? Providing past examples of similar graphics? It was a new and joyful experience. And I’m still really, really good at making web stuff.

I wrote after AAJA that I felt like I had been indoctrinated into the world journalism, as I had into tech two years prior. And from this little slice of the peak of journalism, work- and company-wise, familiar doubts arose.

Was this accountability journalism really that impactful, where we say, “that’s enough for us, time to pass the puck”? Prize judges aren’t diverse not because of anything we can uncover in a story, but because of systemic inequality, Viet Thanh Nguyen reminded us.

I spent the conference networking towards data and interactives roles, but realized afterwards that it felt empty compared to solutions journalism, activist journalism, advocacy. I’ll keep exploring journalism pathways through The Yappie and maybe TSL and see where I end up.

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2. a web dev curriculum

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

OK HERE WE GO IN NYC THIS SUMMER? WANT TO LEARN HOW TO MAKE WEBAPPS? I'm running a: 4️⃣ four-week, twice-a-week 🧑‍💼 in-person class in Flatiron District 📆 starting June 27 💸 pilot for project-based curriculum so it's free 📣 ‼️ dm me if interested!! ‼️ webdevformakers.vercel.app

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

thinking of putting together a "web dev for makers" course go from zero to build any reasonable webapp in a few weeks. HTML, CSS, straight to NextJS frontend (React)+backend (Express) with NextAuth and MongoDB, with all real-world exercises along the way anyone interested?

Funded by a Pomona research grant, I spent three weeks this summer running an in-person web dev course, teaching a dozen New York City undergrads (mostly) how to build fullstack apps using NextJS.

Through the class I confirmed my hypothesis that fullstack web dev can be learned much faster than most people learn it with the right tooling and projects.

Though I don’t want to focus my energy on web dev, I hope my work can continue being useful in the future, perhaps through an on-campus class or public YouTube videos. I would love to explore the non-technical implications of web dev literacy.

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3. a long-overdue launch

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

this one's a long time coming: @postulateapp launch to public access! ever look for the same tutorial or doc over and over? share notes & fall into gdoc permission hell? postulate's opinionated solution: publish gh-style personal knowledge repos. 👉 postulate.us

I started building Postulate in January 2021, and got hundreds of waitlist signups before getting very confused about what I was building and shutting down the startup.

As a passion project, I eventually regained my footing and built out Postulate into something useful for myself: a go-to tool for publishing class, project and life notes. GitHub for knowledge!

In the last week or so, I finally got around to finishing some last features (comments, likes, notifications) and gave Postulate a little public launch on Twitter. It didn’t gain much attention and I don’t intend to promote it much more, but I’m glad that it’s finally out the door.

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4. a music album

This last one’s just for fun. One of my random goals this summer was to get out a music album. The days went on and I didn’t acquire any new musical talent, so it seemed this goal would slip away like so many others.

Then, one night, I made a silly jingle about a stuffed dolphin in GarageBand with my sibling. A few jingles later, our silly little album is out.

I don’t know where this will go in the future, but it was a joyful way for me and my sibling to put our music backgrounds and keyboard to use. Give it a listen!

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5. a semantic search experiment

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

lil side project: semantic document viewer ever have a paper or transcript that you know has a relevant quote but you can't find it and ctrl + f isn't helping? semantic search (meaning, not keyword) might j do the trick play with it: semantic.szh.land

I had a summer goal to build an IDE for journalists, and to finish an online NLP course. This is neither of those things, but related: an experiment implementing semantic search over a user-inputted document. It’s the first time I’ve deployed any ML code, and a technical area I plan to continue exploring.

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6. a late spring shipping log

Finally, here are three projects from the spring, since I didn’t put out a shipping log then. For an overview of my classes and experiences during the semester, read my semester in review.

Asian Law Caucus @aaaj_alc

For years, formerly incarcerated community members, CA families, and orgs like ALC, @AsianPrisonerSC @vietriseoc have been organizing to keep families together. @TheYappie dives in to this powerful history of community advocacy & the #VISIONAct:

theyappie.comInside the campaign to end California’s prison-to-deportation pipeline — The YappieNothing in California law requires local police to cooperate with ICE, but thousands of prisoners—including Southeast Asian refugees—are transferred for deportation each year. A coalition of activists aims to get the practice banned.

With The Yappie and the Solutions Journalism Network, I wrote the first story I’ve ever felt like mattered, on the deportation of formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian Americans in California and the decade of organizing that has made progress towards stopping them. The piece was used by ALC, VietRise and other organizations as a resource for continued advocacy for the VISION Act, which is as urgently needed as ever.

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

lmfao this video blew up and got me 6K subs in the last two weeks for some reason ??

A machine learning video I made a year ago blew up. It now sits at almost 500K views, and my channel at 13K subs. A reminder that the video editing skills I honed and then mostly abandoned remain potentially powerful.

Samson Zhang @wwsalmon

in many cases time-based notes are more natural than doc-based ones -- think about how easy it is to text an "essay" of thoughts to someone vs actually writing one Threader is a notetaking app I built around this idea check it out ~ threader.vercel.app

Lastly, here’s yet another new notetaking app I made! Serves a niche that Postulate, Updately and other tools don’t.

Note: the new link for the project is threader.szh.land!

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And that’s it for now! Subscribe to keep being a part of my journalism and software journeys.