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By Dan Frommer.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015 at 10:24 am.

A Year at Quartz

Toshiba indoor lettuce farm

This week I celebrated my first year working as Quartz’s tech editor. As suspected, working in an office full of really smart, interesting people is great fun. I’ve also had a chance to write some of my favorite stories yet.

These include:

  • The hidden structure of the Apple keynote
  • Touring Toshiba’s high-tech indoor lettuce farm outside of Tokyo (in a former floppy-disk factory)
  • Analyzing Marc Andreessen’s epic first six months on Twitter
  • The story of spatchcocking and how Mark Bittman changed Thanksgiving forever
  • Tim Cook is setting Apple up for its next big hit and he isn’t getting the credit he deserves

I also think it’s interesting to see which stories got the highest readership:

  • How to watch today’s Apple event live (iPhone 6, Apple Watch event)
  • The hidden structure of the Apple keynote
  • This terrible CVS receipt shows why Apple Pay has little to fear from retailers
  • Why the iPhone 6—not the iWatch—is Apple’s biggest launch this year
  • These are the 25 most popular mobile apps in America

I made hundreds of charts over the past year, and this—from the Apple keynotes story—was my favorite.

Steve Jobs Apple keynote chart

I’m really glad this story did well. It was a lot of work, but I think it captures Quartz’s (and my) preferred approach: Finding stories in data that’s often hidden from plain sight. (See also: Google is stealing away Microsoft’s future corporate customers.)

Last, an especially fun experience: Riding the Honda unicycle from that OK Go video.

One of the highlights of my Japan trip was riding Honda's Uni-Cub Beta unicycle — that thing from the latest OK Go video — which won't go on sale for a while. More in my post at qz.com/299526

A video posted by Dan Frommer (@fromedome) on Nov 21, 2014 at 9:12am PST

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