About the artist
James Somers is an American writer and software engineer known for his essays on technology, science, and culture, as well as his early work at Genius (formerly Rap Genius), where he helped build tools for annotating text. Before joining Genius he worked as a developer for the Complex Systems Group at the University of Michigan, and later for Amazon and Pivotal Labs, giving him a background that blends hands-on engineering with longform writing.
His programming projects reflect a curiosity that ranges from playful to deeply technical: he built Jimbo Jeopardy!, a site letting users replay thousands of real Jeopardy! episodes, and Readertron, an open-source clone of the discontinued Google Reader. He has also written and shared code exploring things like Chrome extensions for capturing Google Docs revision history and using diff-match-patch algorithms to reconstruct document edit histories — technical explorations that double as essays about how software and writing intersect.
Somers's essays have appeared in or been featured by The Atlantic, Outside, Language Log, Marginal Revolution, Kottke.org, Longform, Byliner, The Daily Dish, TheBrowser, and Longreads, and have repeatedly topped Hacker News. His writing often bridges technical subjects — programming, data structures, algorithms — with broader questions about creativity, language, and how tools shape thought, making him a distinctive voice at the intersection of software and essayistic nonfiction.