This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss learning to code, how the merch gets made, and video games journalism.
JOSEPH: Good news to people who hate journalists: I actually did learn to code. Once. Quite a while ago at this point. I took a course called Automating OSINT that taught you how to do all sorts of things with Python. It wasn’t one of those courses that was like, ‘now we’re going to make a little game with code :)’. It was actually practical: here’s how to make a Pastebin scraper; here’s how to archive a target Twitter account’s tweets (back when Twitter API access didn’t cost a small fortune); and eventually how to build your own search engine for all that collected intelligence. It gave me concrete stuff to make that I could use for my journalism.
It was a fantastic course, written by the fantastic Justin Seitz, and it marked the start of me making all sorts of my own tools. I made one for pulling out email addresses from hacked databases so I could more quickly get a handle of what had happened in a data breach; this absolutely led to me breaking stories before others could because I made the computer do a big chunk of the work for me. I also made various tools for pulling and hunting court documents from PACER, the U.S. court records system, as I’ve mentioned a few times.