Audrey Watters

My greatest triumph this week was my post "Cassandra: Predicting the Future of NoSQL." It took me a long time to write, in part because it took me a long time to grok WTF is NoSQL. And so I'm pretty proud I was able to pull together a blog post...

I spent much of the week at OSCON, which served in part as a very visual reminder for something that is always on the back of my mind: the absence of women in tech. While women make up 25% of those who work in the tech industry, they comprise only...

The films The Matrix (1999) and Memento (2000) were released less than a year apart, and they share a dark vision of the world -- one with uncertain realities, confused, if not unreliable narrators, protagonists struggling to regain control of their story. And while the comparisons between The Matrix and...

I get a lot of press releases: Tomorrow morning at [time of day. subtract 45 minutes if you are from the NYT], [Company name, vowels optional], a [location]-based startup will launch its latest [feature, Wordpress template, Facebook game, mobile app, round of funding, viral video]. This means that [Company name]...

I'm getting better at this whole tech-blogging-on-the-road thing, which is great as I'm off to OSCON this week and will once again have to balance Internet, power, and prose. But before I get too far ahead of myself and gush over the promise of open source technology, let me gush...

I quit Facebook in frustration a few months ago. I was sick of all the privacy bullshit. There was no big fanfare, just a couple of blog posts. I deactivated my account, and I was done. At one point, it's fair to say, Facebook played a big part in how...

Kin and I spent the week in California, and we just got back tonight. I love being on the road, love being in San Francisco. But it was the first trip south for me since starting at ReadWriteWeb so being in the city was "business" and "pleasure." I met lots...

It's been a long time -- far too long -- since I immersed myself deeply in fiction. Perhaps that sounds strange for someone who professes such a love for reading and writing, for someone who was working on a PhD in literature. It was, in all likelihood, that PhD that...

A big thank you to Kathleen Fitzpatrick who drew my attention to the fifth anniversary today of Ivan Tribble's classic "advice column" in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Bloggers Need Not Apply. In his rant, Tribble blasted academic job applicants for having blogs. "The pertinent question for bloggers," he asks,...

Although I make my living (in part) by writing about technology, my training is admittedly strong on writing but weak on technology. Any tech skills I possess come from my own keen interest in learning about the topic, my own ferocious pursuit of answers when I've known IT was wrong,...