I’m a technology reporter and data/graphics developer, covering computer crime, open source programming, and tech-related IP law at Quartz in New York City. My work has previously appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fast Company, Slate, Al Jazeera America, and on the Associated Press newswire.

Select work samples

This is a selection of some of my favorite and most relevant work. There’s a more comprehensive list of my past work (2010 to mid-2016) on the archive page.

Computer crime / tech security

[Feature] Inside the digital heist that terrorized the world—and only made $100k (Quartz)

[Data] Victims of the WannaCry ransomware attacks have stopped paying up (Quartz)

[News] Watch as these bitcoin wallets receive ransomware payments from the ongoing global cyberattack (Quartz)

[Feature] If you only work on your malware on weekdays, you might be a CIA hacker (Quartz)

[Feature] Today we’re worried about smart TVs, but in the 1980s Russian spies were hacking typewriters (Quartz)

[Interactive] Never trust the first number announced in a data breach (Quartz)

[Feature] Inside the IRS data breach (Quartz)

[Feature] Here’s what your stolen identity goes for on the dark web (Quartz)

[Feature] Developers keep leaving secret keys to corporate data out in the open for anyone to take (Quartz)

[Feature] Your checking account is probably easier to hack into than your email (Quartz)

[Feature] Here’s Why Companies Keep Losing the Battle Against Hackers (Bloomberg)

[Feature] You’re being watched: a story about modern espionage (Matter)

Code and intellectual property

[Feature] A Supreme Court case involving artificial sweeteners could have a huge impact on Silicon Valley (Quartz)

[Feature] GitHub now lets its workers keep the IP when they use company resources for personal projects (Quartz)

[News] Oculus CTO John Carmack disputes claim that he copied code (Quartz)

[Feature] The future of software depends on a jury’s ability to understand this question (Quartz)

[Feature] The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule (Quartz)

[Feature] How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code (Quartz)

General tech and science

[Feature] How Adobe Flash, once the face of the web, fell to the brink of obscurity (Quartz)

[Data] Why researchers keep citing retracted papers (Quartz)

[Feature] The tumultuous history of the drugs that helped cure Jimmy Carter (Quartz)

[Data] How do you put a price on a video game when it’s the first of its kind? (Quartz)

[Interactive] The long goodbye to Internet Explorer (Quartz)

[Interactive] Why infectious bacteria are winning (Quartz)

[Interactive] Measles in America (Bloomberg)

Politics

[Feature/data] With H-1B under threat, Alphabet is the only big tech company to ramp up immigration lobbying (Quartz)

[Interactive] An interactive guide to Donald Trump’s Twitter exclamations. Enjoy! (Quartz)

[Interactive] 10,000 words ranked according to their Trumpiness (Quartz)

[Data] The disengaged plurality: 42% of eligible US voters stayed home (Quartz)

[Data] Brexit in context: Every EU membership vote since 1972 (Quartz)

[Data] Coups d’etat have become less common but more successful (Quartz)

[Interactive] This is how fast America changes its mind (Bloomberg, winner of a Malofiej award)

[Interactive] A really small slice of Americans gets to decide who will rule the Senate (Bloomberg, included in FiveThirtyEight’s “best data journalism of 2014”)

General data / visual / interactive

[Data] Why the Dow 20K milestone is meaningless: a visual guide (Quartz)

[Data] The most misleading charts of 2015, fixed (Quartz)

[Data] America’s most prolific wall punchers, charted (Quartz)

[Interactive] How much daylight does daylight saving time save? (Quartz)

[Interactive] Follow the flow of Syrian civilians from the Middle East to Western Europe (Quartz)

[Interactive] Explore the complex network of allies and enemies in Syria’s civil war (Quartz, winner of an Information is Beautiful award)

[Interactive] The injuries most likely to land you in an emergency room in America (Quartz)

[Interactive] How to build an Oscar winner (Bloomberg)

[Interactive] Time Warner: 25 years of acquisitions, sales and spinoffs (Businessweek)

Projects

These are my latest experiments with code. See more on my devlog.

Code

mapquery - A map data storage and retrieval API.

pi-bots - A simple system for running Twitter bots from your Raspberry Pi.

predictive - A library for generating predictive, ebooks-esque text using word pairs.

codebreaker - A word game made in JavaScript. Race the computer to guess a four-letter word with no repeating letters. Play the game at http://keithcollins.github.io/codebreaker/.

Bots

@actual_ransom - A bot that watches the bitcoin wallets tied to the WannaCry ransomware attack. Code available here.

@usinjuries - This bot tweets descriptions of emergency room visits from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

@abstractascii - Tries to generate ascii art by parsing and reconstructing human-made ascii art.

@the_hum_bot - Based on the World Hum Map and Database Project.