I write professionally and non-. If you'd rather do something than sit around and read, check out Crummy Features or Software Calculated to Drive you Mad.

Weblogs

And other ongoing concerns.

• News You Can Bruise is my main squeeze, weblog-wise, since 1997. Now you can read the best NYCB entries, as voted by readers. And me.
• My del.icio.us feed is connected directly to my prefrontal cortex. My wife also posts to this feed.
• I put up conversations I have in podcast form.
• Roy's Postcards is a presentation of and commentary on over a thousand postcards my father wrote in the 1980s. It started in 2009 and will run until 2012.
• The Future: A Retrospective is an audit of a 1989 book of technological predictions. It ran from June 2007 to March 2008.
• I contribute to the group weblog Spam as Folk Art.
• From 1998 to 2001 I edited and wrote for the geek humor site segfault.org.
• From 1993 to 1996 I ran Da Warren BBS and Grill.

Nonfiction

Books

RESTful Web Services (O'Reilly, 2007). With Sam Ruby.

Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2006). With Lucas Carlson. 2007 Jolt Awards Finalist

Beginning Python (Wiley, 2005). Co-author.

Article-length

• The System of the World Wide Web. (Self-published) 2007.
• Unit Testing Your Documentation. (O'Reilly Network) 2006.
• Building and filling out templates with Python and Cheetah. (IBM developerWorks, 2006)

Technical papers and presentations

• How To Recognize Different Types Of Web Services From Quite A Long Way Away (TriZPUG, 2010)
• Developers Like Hypermedia, But They Don't Like Web Browsers (preprint) (WS-REST, 2010)
• Justice Will Take us Millions of Intricate Moves: A Maturity Heuristic For Web Services and Two Other Stories (QCon, 2008)
• The Ultra Gleeper: A Recommendation Engine for Web Pages (CodeCon, 2005)
• Beyond the Config File: User-Friendly Configuration For Web Apps: (Pycon and EuroPython, 2003)

Miscellaneous

• "Loaded Dice". Data experiments run on data from BoardGameGeek.

Fiction

"Expect great things from Leonard Richardson." —Cory Doctorow

Novels

Constellation Games. A novel about space aliens and video games. 2010. Seralized by Candlemark & Gleam starting November 2011.

Short Stories

• "Found Objects" - How do you sculpt space junk? 2011. Bonus story for Constellation Games.
• "Dana no Chousen" - My blood-soaked tribute to GameCenter CX. 2011. Bonus story for Constellation Games.
• "Maxwell's Succubus" - Everything they told you about D&D is true. 2011. Unpublished.
• "Four Kinds of Cargo" - Space opera about space opera. 2011. Unpublished.
• "The Day Alan Turing Came Out" - Shameless wish fulfillment. 2009. Published October 2010 in Retro Spec.
• Thoughtcrime Experiments (editor): an anthology of other peoples' amazing fiction. 2009. Self-published.
• "The Highest Bidders" - Alien invasion in the age of NAFTA. 2008. Unpublished.
• "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" - Exactly what you think it is. 2008. Published 2009 in Strange Horizons.
• "Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree" - Science fiction about fantasy about science fiction. 2008. Unpublished.
• "The Sterile Area" - Ballardian security theatre. 2008. Unpublished.
• "The Eyes of Ceres" - Golden Age-style semihard SF. 2007. Unpublished.
• "Vanilla" - Mundane space opera. 2006. Unpublished.
• "Mallory" - Mundane cyberpunk. 2005. Published 2008 in Futurismic.
• "Jake Berendes West Covina" - 2000. Subversion through fiscal policy. Self-published.
• "Grunion Time" - 1997. Magical realism without the magic. Incoherent but very short. Self-published.

Short-short

A lot of very short one-off fiction goes into News You Can Bruise. Here's some of it.

• The panspermia cannon. Reprinted in Infinity's Kitchen, as I found out much later.
• The last scene of a screenplay: "Gravlax".
• Some 101-word stories in the style of Anacrusis: Phyla, Sumana, Malcolm, Silas, Fast Jack, and Leanne.
• Fake interviews with a deep-sea coffinfish and Transformers producer Tom DeSanto.

Bagatelles

Miscellaneous short-form stuff, some of it pretty old.

• In 2004 I co-wrote some one-off comics (1 2 3) and a storyline for Kris Straub's webcomic Checkerboard Nightmare. This one is surely the best.
• Some comics created under constraints from NYCB readers: "'Kangaroo' Jack Masters in Caution: Filling Is Hot!". Constrained Cat and Girl fan comics: "In the Black", "The Best Strategy", "Going Outside".
• Another travelogue, of my trip to PyCon 2003.
• Tonight's Episode: Show titles for a long-running, pop-culture-obsessed police procedural. When it jumped the shark, the shark jumped back. R.I.P.
• Doctor Virtual's Cyber-Couch matches the Internet's collective unconscious with the Internet's favorite psychiatrist. 3 episodes.
• Behind the Firewall, an essay on having one's open source software being made proprietary. Written while the pain was still fresh.
• Reddish Purple vs. Bluish Purple, a superior visualization of the 2000 presidential race. Much more sophisticated visualizations were available by 2004.
• Make Dan Complain, a fun game to be played with my one-time roommate Dan Helfman.
• My less successful, incomplete travelogue of my trip to a Linux World Expo in 1999. At this point I stopped doing big complicated travelogues.
• My epic travelogue of a 1998 trip to Texas, with pictures. This piece marks a turning point for my writing, where I began to rely less on obscure references and wordplay and more on...whatever I rely on now.
• Do you dare uncover The Forbidden Secrets of crummy.com?
• Jack in the Box and the International Christian Conspiracy, from 1998 when Crummy still had pretensions of being a general humor webzine. Despite my best efforts this article has not started any kind of urban legend.
• The Deficient Adventures of Captain Planet, a five-page collaborative comic book by me and Kristofer Straub. 1997.
• The Race For The White House, a satirical photoessay I did for my high school paper in April 1996. Still pretty funny.

The Work of Others

Finally, a few works by other people that I've put up for everyone to enjoy.

• A gem from the webzine-era Crummy. Kristofer Straub's Cool Site of the Femtosecond.
• A text dump from the 1984 IBM PC game Flightmare
• The Haunted Author, by Marcus Clarke.
• The Late Benjamin Franklin, by Mark Twain.