About

I’m Derrick Spies. I live in East London in the Eastern Cape, and I was born in Gqeberha down the coast.

I worked as a journalist for most of my career, at The Herald, the Daily Dispatch and News24, and for a while I taught journalism at Nelson Mandela University and Varsity College. I still write, but less of it is news now. I am working on a book about how people find and trust information when search engines are being replaced by AI, and I have a long-running fiction project that I return to between other things.

I also build small software tools, mostly for my own use and occasionally for other people. Some of what shows up here will be about that.

This site is where I keep writing that does not have another home. There is no schedule. If something here is useful to you, or wrong, I would like to hear about it.