I’ve been at the Seattle Times for four weeks now. Apparently time flies when you love your job, too. We’re working on some pretty great stuff, but we finally took the curtain off of my first real project.

No, Jonathan Martin is not my West Coast alias. Scroll down a little more, and you may notice a little map. There, that’s the one.

If you’re curious (and if you’re on this blog, you’d better be curious), that is a cute little widget that will automatically pan to and highlight whichever district a web producer specifies. Oh look, here’s one for the 6th district. We even have one for the whole state with all legislative and congressional districts.

So what’s the big deal? The same map tiles and code are running these simple visualizations, meaning any state election story can easily have location-based context. All the web producer has to do is tell it which district to put in focus.

That’s simplicity.

And if you’re wondering what my actual first published work was? Pieces of this.