The Return of Tech Broiler
In February of 2023, I joined the Substack bandwagon with many folks in the tech industry looking for an alternative pulpit to Twitter and as a blogging platform. I used it primarily for writing various thought leadership pieces that I couldn’t place in other venues, but also to write about different things that interest me within the realms of tech and food, which is a huge passion of mine.
For various reasons I would rather not discuss (and frankly, I think enough other folks have gone much deeper into the reasons why than I could possibly desire to), I’ve decided to leave Substack and set up a new blog on Ghost called Tech Broiler. It combines my passions for technology and food. For those of you who have been following me for the last 25 years, I thank you for sticking with me for this long.
Who is this guy?
Since 2008, I've written a column at ZDNET (originally called “Tech Broiler" so now, it's back) that is a mix of op-ed commentary and product reviews. I write it in old-school style, which is to say it is long-form (you want me to do less than 1000 words? HA!) and thick with analysis. I'm also not the guy who works off deadlines and needs to get my commentary in with the rest of the crowd; it takes me weeks or even months to get a good sense of what a product is, and I like to go deep; you’re not going to get the TL: DR version of things if you stick around.
It’s been a heck of a ride for me since the golden days of technology journalism — I started in the mid-1990s when we had these things printed on dead trees called “magazines.” By the mid-2000s, all of that went the way of the dodo bird, and we became “bloggers,” it all came down to pageviews and monetization, forever changing how we would write and target our audiences.
I have always been a bit different from your average tech writer. For me, this was (and still is) a hobby or a side gig for the longest time. For the balance of my professional career, I worked as a technologist at companies like Unisys, IBM, NTT, and Microsoft and also as an independent consultant on Wall Street before that. Until December 2023, I was Editorial Director at the Linux Foundation for four years.
So I’ve always looked at tech through the lens of both a practitioner and a technology enthusiast, and with a different level of appreciation and understanding about these products and services than most industry writers.
Why Ghost?
Everyone seems to be using it now for content-rich blogs (as opposed to WordPress), and I think it’s a cool platform. It’s also (like WordPress) open source software, which I am passionate about, given my previous role at the Linux Foundation.
My original intent was to self-host on AWS Lightsail, an awesome and easy way to deploy many applications that is amazingly affordable for personal and SMB cloud hosting. But I ran into several issues getting Ghost to work correctly (at no fault of AWS; it’s the Bitnami image blueprint that is poorly documented), so for now, I’m using Ghost Pro, the SaaS version. When and if it works correctly, I’ll likely host the open source on AWS.
For now, I’ve migrated all the Substack posts over, and I’ll have some new things to say here soon. Welcome to (the return of) Tech Broiler!
