My writings

This is a small collection of writing that I've done. If something here speaks to you, reach out to me and let's talk about it.

The Goal Is to Think as Little as Possible (without Ever Being Wrong)

July 13th 2025

I Got Fine-Tuned to Use More Em Dashes Too

June 3rd 2025

If You Want to Learn How to Read, Learn How to Edit

April 11th 2025

Glimpses of a Much More Useful Future

March 19th 2025

Nobody Watches Computers Play Chess

March 6th 2025

Writing as "Something Humans Do"

January 27th 2025

Republishing My Simpsons Fan Site, Twenty Years Later

January 5th 2025

Where to Put All the Lizard-Brain Content?

October 23rd 2024

Crawlers in the Henhouse

September 24th 2024

The Ever-Moving Tech Stack

November 1st 2023

The Birthright of Creativity

May 12th 2023

What Was It about Zebo?

February 9th 2023

Nye County Funnel Cake

October 9th 2022

Sit and Speak

January 11th 2022

Carly Beeper's Blinding Light

September 8th 2020

A Pizza Shop in Oxford

July 28th 2019

Harvard's Impact on The Simpsons

March 23rd 2017

Living by my values

Curiosity, pragmatism, courage, and compassion.

About me

I'm a software engineer, writer, media preservationist, and mindfulness practitioner. My core interests are in finding and building tools at the crossroads of these things.

Always building

I grew up with computers, picking up PHP and MySQL when I was 12 and building my first website, an ode to The Simpsons and Simpsons internet culture, in 2003 when I was in seventh grade. Both my father, who was a programmer, and my mother, who led multiple organizations in insurance tech, were very supportive of my interest in technology and the internet.

Bingeclock

Online since 2014 and enjoyed by tens of millions in that time, Bingeclock is a tool for cognizant media consumption. Media features have appeared in AV Club, Slashfilm, Time, Quartz, IEEE Spectrum, SFGate, Stacker, Complex, Vice, Forbes, Uproxx, Kottke, Mashable, TechRadar, Yahoo TV, Vsauce3, The Awesomer, BGR, The Mary Sue, Inquisitr, and others.

Features on Bingeclock include:

Are We Trek Yet?

Are We Trek Yet? is a tracker of humanity's progress building the technologies that Star Trek suggested, from holodecks to replicators. It assigns a status of "available," "in progress," or "not yet" to each technology and notes groups that are working on making them a reality. At launch, it reached the top spots on the subreddits r/InternetIsBeautiful, r/scifi, and r/singularity.

iTypedMyPaper

iTypedMyPaper is a tool for writers and students to create evidence that they wrote something the old-fashioned, manual way (on a keyboard). It's open source under the MIT license and available on GitHub.

Always learning

While I build primarily with a combination of Python, PHP, MySQL, React Native, and vanilla JavaScript, I enjoy trying out new things. I have worked with a wide range of other coding languages, frameworks, and systems, including C++, Lisp, multiple flavors of Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, NixOS, Kali), lots of AWS (S3, EC2, RDS, Lambda, Bedrock), other clouds (Azure, Cloudflare, DigitalOcean), Hack, React, React Native, Node.js, Docker, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, TLA+, and of course, Git. (I also have many hours of experience with Adobe Flash but I've been told not to include that. Out of respect for the Ruffle maintainers, I've opted to put it here as a paranthetical.)

Planning for the 2030s

I believe that we are living through a decade of seismic socioeconomic change. My overarching goal through all my current projects is to help imbue a sense of mindfulness, which has meant so much to me in my life, wherever possible in technology and media.

Freelance writing

I did freelance writing full-time on Fiverr, as a "Pro Verified" and "Top Rated" seller, from 2015 to 2025, after which I took a step back to focus on my web properties. Media features with Fiverr appeared in Luckbox Magazine, Bloomberg, Morning Brew, and Insider. I also appeared on Carrie French's YouTube channel to talk about ethics and transparency in business and wrote and produced a Fiverr Learn course about ghostwriting.

Through Fiverr, my freelance writing services were employed by top-tier brands such as Amazon, monday.com, Mayo Clinic, Farmers Insurance, Fiverr itself, Redefine Meat, Great Ape Games, and Spot My Dot.

It was my distinct honor as a ghostwriter to help people from more than 120 countries talk through, understand, and express their own experiences and insights with clearer, more poignant usages of the English language.

Earlier on

I grew up in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, obtaining my BA in English Literature and Classics (mostly translating Classical Latin literature) at Lehigh University. I'm grateful to my advisors Dr. Kate Crassons (English Literature) and Dr. Barbara Pavlock (Classics), for mentoring me and teaching me about careful, passion-driven scholarship.

Volunteering

Since 2018, I have volunteered as a mentor and done editing on the annual anthology for PEN America's Prison Writing Program.

VHS, vinyl, Betamax, DVD

I preserve and restore physical media as a hobby. This is a matter of principle to me: especially as recommendation algorithms become even more powerful than they already are, I believe it's important for individuals to maintain control over the state of the media we consume.

Reading, reading, reading

Some of my favorite novelists are Kazuo Inshiguro, Ursula Le Guin, Chinua Achebe, Marilynne Robinson, Stanisław Lem, Norman Maclean, Margaret Atwood, and Thornton Wilder. I like the non-fiction works of Jaron Lanier, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, and Ram Dass.

Running and fitness

To date I have run one marathon and about a dozen half-marathons, including the 2024 Poconos Spartan 10K, 2014 Tower of Terror 10-Miler, 2014 New Beford Half Marathon, 2013 Heartbreak Hill Half Marathon, and 2012-2015 Runner's World Half Marathons. I also enjoy practicing yoga and lifting weights.

Meditation and self-reflection

With my partner, by myself, or in a big group, I like to exist in silence. It brings me back to the source of everything else in my life.

Did you see something you like here? Do you want to talk about something I'm doing? Something you're doing? Reach out to me!

Billy Gardner McIntyre Me in my natural habitat, caffeinated and staring at an electronic device.