What I’m Doing Now

Updated November 11, 2026

This is my now page: a snapshot of what I’m focused on at the moment. For my background, see the About page.

Teaching

Teaching JOUR 2720: Digital Visualization in the School of Communication Studies at Mount Royal University this fall
Centred the course on design fundamentals, visual literacy, data accuracy, charting, and visual production for communications majors
Students work hands-on with open-source and industry-standard tools, including Excel, Datawrapper, Flourish, Voyant Tools, Miro, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe Express
We also dig into the history of data visualization, including its contested origin stories

Co-hosting Examining with Kris Hans
Recently hit episode 100: a look at Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity and a reflection on 100 episodes

Using AI daily for productivity, primarily Claude and Claude Code
Starting to experiment with AI agents and automated workflows, like scheduled tasks
Exploring how agents can carry out authorized work on my behalf
Running small language models (Gemma and Qwen) locally through Ollama on my M5 MacBook Pro. I love the idea of a completely private AI chat, and I’m still tuning the settings and context windows.

On a decluttering stint, both physical and digital, with a focus on old papers and documents
Automating daily logs and project progress notes in Obsidian, which is connected to my AI tools

Interested in Clarke Ching’s The Bottleneck Rules and David Epstein’s new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better
Thinking about the theory of constraints and how it applies to workplace decision-making and to design
Testing Affinity as a replacement for Adobe Creative Cloud, especially now that the new all-in-one app runs natively on iPad