What am I up to?

Last updated Dec 11, 2023

My time in New York consisted mostly of meetings with some inspiring individuals (besides working). I took around 850 photos, visited numerous museums, drank over 40 coffee cups, and walked more than 200 km exploring the city. Surprisingly, I only used the subway twice!

After talking and seeing a lot of different things over three weeks, here are my main takeaways:

⎯ Getting inspiration from sources outside your own sector can be incredibly beneficial. While I used to focus solely on my field, I now plan to explore things and areas I'm not familiar with.

⎯ Engaging in a side project unrelated to your job can provide new perspectives and ways to approach tasks and not everything should be defined by awards or accolades (been there).

On a less humble note, I received an electric drum set as a birthday present from my wife, and learning something new hasn't been easy. My brain struggles to process multiple things simultaneously. There are moments when you feel useless and stupid, but with persistence, you gradually understand what's happening with this thing!

Now, I'm getting ready for the holidays, finishing a year focused on finding new ways to tell stories through illustrations when data isn't easily accessible. I'm also thinking about the different storytelling methods I can try out, using the lessons from my drumming experience to tackle coding in the upcoming year.

Saturday ∙ Sep 23, 2023

Getting ready to visit New York for three weeks in October to work with the graphics and international team and take some time off (say hi if you're in NYC).

Just on the same day I'm heading there, I have a talk at the second dataviz meetup in Seoul, where I'll be presenting "The power of physical immersion" on October 14th.

I'm also pondering for the thousandth time whether I should enroll a general JavaScript course or go for Svelte.

Monday ∙ Sep 15, 2023

This is the new version of my website (old website), where I want to talk more about what I do, who I am, what I think, and what I use in my daily life as a visual journalist, also known as a graphics reporter/editor, but most importantly, as a regular person.

I've decided to skip the usual page with awards, typical introductions, and my carefully chosen works. Instead, here, you can see a list of my work at the South China Morning Post, Bloomberg in Hong Kong, and finally, The New York Times. My main goal is to update the website more often and restart the newsletter I began last year on Revue (Twitter), but stopped working, and now I'm doing it with new "sections" on Substack. Back to this website, in the future, I plan to add a section with tools and other interesting stuff.

Just so you know, I'm not using any fancy technology for this website. I'm doing manual updates using CSS and HTML.