CST 703 - Technical Research Writing & Communication Skills

Simon Willison is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data. He currently works full-time building open source tools for data journalism, built around Datasette and SQLite.
Prior to becoming an independent open source developer, Simon was an engineering director at Eventbrite. Simon joined Eventbrite through their acquisition of Lanyrd, a Y Combinator funded company he co-founded in 2010.
He is a co-creator of the Django Web Framework, and has been blogging about web development and programming since 2002.

Spyglass is a collection of written works, thoughts, and analysis by M.G. Siegler, a long-time technology investor and writer. While the core focus is on the tech sector, a wide-range of topics will be explored. Perhaps the best way to frame the site is as a real-time notebook for what M.G. is reading and thinking about from a vantage point that's outside of Silicon Valley after so many years on the inside.

Stratechery provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media, and the impact of technology on society.

Started in 1997 by Floor64 founder Mike Masnick and then growing into a group blogging effort, the Techdirt blog relies on a proven economic framework to analyze and offer insight into news stories about changes in government policy, technology and legal issues that affect companies’ ability to innovate and grow. As the impact of technological innovation on society, civil liberties and consumer rights has grown, Techdirt’s coverage has expanded to include these critical topics.

404 Media is a journalist-founded digital media company exploring the ways technology is shaping–and is shaped by–our world, focused on investigative reports, longform features, blogs, and scoops about topics including: hacking, cybersecurity, cybercrime, sex, artificial intelligence, consumer rights, surveillance, privacy, and the democratization of the internet.

From August, 2025, a good summary of the many arguments against generative AI/LLMs by Ed Zitron.

AI skeptic Ed Zitron was previously a games journalist, writing for PC Zone, CVG, Eurogamer and others, been published in the The Atlantic, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, USAToday, TechCrunch, and named one of the top 50 PR people in tech four times.

An excellent summary from August, 2025 of the current harms from LLMs by Anthony Moser, a data journalist.

The MS-CC is nurturing a powerful alliance to improve cyberinfrastructure capabilities at historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and minority-serving institutions.