A distant voice

This web site presents materials written or maintained by Andy Oram.

Articles Fiction
Poetry Spiritual glosses
Backtraces, a memoir Who is Praxagora?

I write and edit works about many aspects of computing, ranging in size from blog postings to full-length books. For many years I worked as an editor at O’Reilly Media (formerly O’Reilly & Associates), a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. My topics there covered a wide range of computer technologies: data science and machine learning, programming languages, Web performance, Internet of Things, databases, free and open source software, and more. My editorial output includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer (frequently cited in connection with those technologies), and the 2007 title Beautiful Code. My modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

In health care, I have produced a comprehensive report on the various manifestations of health IT and their relation to health reform, along with a stream of articles for popular health IT sites. I also contribute articles to many publications about policy issues related to the Internet and about trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. You can get a sense of the breadth of my work from my list of online articles.

Print publications where my work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. I have presented talks at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, DebConf, and LibrePlanet. My poems have been published in more than 50 journals.

I have lived in the Boston, Massachusetts area for more than 30 years, where I have spent many hours on grunt work for non-profits, in addition to serving on some boards and doing grant-writing for them.

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[Photo of myself]

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