Chris Chinchilla

I am a technical communicator with a love of explaining technical concepts in documentation, blog posts, videos, books and more. I run a small agency called Gregarious Mammal if you’re interested in hiring me for that kind of thing.

This website is a home for all my blog posts, podcasts, newsletters and creative projects.

It’s also new and very much in development, so watch this space. 👀

Next events

Currently taking a break 😌

Latest posts

- more

Netlify Dev- Test the Netlify Hosting Platform Locally

for dzone

A DZone Zone Leader shares a podcast where he interviews the founder of Netlify and then shows how to use this platform on you local machine.

Pengwin- Linux Optimized for the Windows Subsystem

for dzone

Here’s a walkthrough of Pengwin, a custom Linux distro built specifically with Windows in mind.

Revolutionizing Health Data With Arkhn

for dzone

A discussion of what the team at Arkhn is doing with health data and the impact they hope it will have.

Q and A- Making Open Source More Accessible to Enterprises

for dzone

In this interview, see what one company’s philosophy about open source products and development for enterprise apps holds.

Fluree- Blockchain, GraphQL, and More- All in One Database

for dzone

Learn more about Fluree and listen to an interview one of our Zone Leaders had with Co-CEO Brian Platz.

Latest podcasts

Marco Palladino of Kong, Sugar, Sobriety and Vegetarian Tech

for The Weekly Squeak

I speak with Marco Palladino of Kong about their API gateway, microservice mesh and smart docs generation.

The state of mobile networks with OpenSignal

for The Weekly Squeak

In this episode I speak with Ian Fogg of OpenSignal about our current 4G network, and the future 5G one. Also featured is D&D for product teams, educating on the history of the British Empire, Visual Basic, Project Catalyst, Libra, escaping the smart city and more!

KubeCon - Solo.io, Digital Ocean and Atlassian

for The Weekly Squeak

In part 2 of interviews from KubeCon, I speak with the following people about developments in the world of Kubernetes:

KubeCon - IBM, Canonical and Rancher

for The Weekly Squeak

In part 1 of interviews from KubeCon, I speak with the following people about developments in the world of Kubernetes:

Mark Marron of Bosque, Microsoft's new programming language

for The Weekly Squeak

I speak with Mark Marron of Microsoft about their new language that is simple, obvious, and easy to reason about for both humans and machines.

Recommendations and Newsletters

I currently curate 4 newsletters on Ethics (mostly in technology), Blockchain, Language and Linguistics, see my latest recommendations and join those newsletters below.

The Weekly Squeak Newsletter

My general newsletter "The Weekly Squeak" draws content from all these sources and a couple more, sign up to that below.

Latest ethics posts

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below.

'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed

from The Guardian

It was a beautiful winter day in San Francisco, and Zoe was grooving to the soundtrack of the roller-skating musical Xanadu as she rode an e-scooter to work.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

from The Register

Off-the-shelf object-recognition systems struggle, relatively speaking, to identify common items in hard-up homes in countries across Africa, Asia, and South America. The same software performs better at identifying stuff in richer households in Europe and North America.

We All Work for Facebook

from Longreads

When I was a kid, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, my screen time was all about Nickelodeon. My favorite show was “You Can’t Do That on Television.” It was a kind of sketch show; the most common punchline was a bucket of green slime being dropped on characters’ heads.

Who’s Really Buying Property in San Francisco?

from The Atlantic

Updated on April 19 at 1:28 p.m. ET. There has never been a town like the one San Francisco is becoming, a place where a single industry composed almost entirely of rich people thoroughly dominates the local economy.

Is Software Eating the World?

from

As creators of technology, we need to ask whether our progress is antagonistic to the place that we call home.

Latest language posts

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below.

The most important tech boom designers are ignoring

from Fast Company

Voice assistants are a part of everyday life, and they’re here to stay. Juniper Research recently released a report predicting that by 2023 there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use, tripling the estimated 2.5 billion voice assistants in use at the end of 2018.

Smart speakers: Why your voice is a major battle in music

from BBC

Smart speakers, those voice-activated devices that allow you to check the weather, play podcasts or order food delivery, are becoming more and more common in our homes.

Notes on Writing Weird Fiction By H. P. Lovecraft

from

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.

A Harvard Linguist's (and Bill Gates's Favorite Author) 13 Simple Tips for Becoming a Great Writer

from Inc. Magazine

If you were looking for someone to teach you how to become a better writer, you probably couldn't do any better than Steven Pinker. The famed Harvard linguist is the author of several bestsellers, and Bill Gates even called one of them his favorite book of all time.

12 open source tools for natural language processing

from Opensource.com

Natural language processing (NLP), the technology that powers all the chatbots, voice assistants, predictive text, and other speech/text applications that permeate our lives, has evolved significantly in the last few years.

Latest blockchain posts

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below.

How The Cryptocurrency World Is Responding To Facebook's Libra

from Gizmodo India

Facebook succeeded in at least one part of its new digital currency grand plan: Get a spotlight. Regulators in both the United States and Europe are already pushing for strong oversight - in one case, Rep.

Facebook plans June 18th cryptocurrency debut. Here’s what we know

from TechCrunch

Facebook is finally ready to reveal details about its cryptocurrency codenamed Libra.

A blockchain listicle for designers

from

There are five key areas that need to be addressed to make the next generation of blockchain products and services more user friendly. By Ward Oosterlijnck, Creative Technologist, Portable.

UBIK Executes First Successful Official Blockchain Vote in Croatia

from

Croatia successfully executed the first formal blockchain-based vote during UBIK's yearly assembly. UBIK is Croatia's self regulating blockchain and cryptocurrency organization. The vote was registered on Croatia's Lisinski Testnet.

A Fight Over Specialized Chips Threatens an Ethereum Split

from WIRED

In July 2016, Ethereum endured an early test of faith. The people behind the barely year-old blockchain had taken Bitcoin’s idea of decentralized money and run with it, building a digital landscape where users, based on a mutual trust in code, could interact and create applications.