chromatic's professional work

Onyx Neon is an independent publisher devoted to finding great authors and underserved topics.

Our greatest success so far has been Modern Perl, but we're slowly building up our catalog. We've even expanded into fiction, with great books like Gigapolis and the Cifiscape series.

I maintain the publishing toolkit we use to turn the typed word into beautifully formatted books. The Modern Perl Books blog grew out of our Perl work to explore how the language evolved.

As the technical director of Big Blue Marble, I wrote much of the backend for Trendshare, a site devoted to value investing and financial literacy for novice investors.

Besides the expected work of handling a large dataset with lots of number crunching, the number of ways that data can go wrong and give weird answers is staggering. The site tracks several thousand publicly traded stocks and performs standard financial analysis techniques to suggest the price below which each stock looks like a bargain.

Obviously there's a lot more to picking a good stock than taking an algorithm's word for what's on sale, but Trendshare does the hard/boring/tedious number crunching for you and lets you focus on understanding businesses you might want to own.

Outspeaking

Occasionally I contribute to the site Outspeaking. I'm particularly proud of What is Programming?, which is an explanation of computer programming by three metaphors, and What is Deficit Spending?, an exploration of currenty and macroeconomics for the layperson.

Blender Recipe Reviews

I set up this site for family members who want to publish their experiments in healthy eating. It's probably the least mature of all of my projects, but it's the tastiest. If you've ever asked yourself how to make a smoothie, start there!