Lead reporter Brady Dale is heading to the New York Observer

Technical.ly cofounder Chris Wink and I first started writing posts for this site in August 2013. During those heady early days filing stories ahead of our launch date, we discovered the tech entrepreneur running for mayor and the DIY genetics lab working with rare plants in Alaska.
Then we went live. And for the next 21 months I worked the beat here in Brooklyn as best I knew how. Now, this was my first stint as a beat reporter. I didn’t have a newsroom with older reporters to emulate. With the support of the Technical.ly team, I learned it as I went.

It has been great to watch so closely the broader city’s evolving understanding of this end of Long Island.
If all of this sounds a little past-tense, it is. On Wednesday morning I start as a full-time reporter for the New York Observer’s innovation vertical. I’m moving on from Technical.ly Brooklyn and broadening my reporting to the larger technology scene as a whole. In this new role, I look forward to continuing to watch a lot of the makers I’ve come to know and admire in Brooklyn.
If you really want to keep up with what I’m doing, just follow me on Twitter. I also have a Contently profile.
I’ve written 1,222 posts on Technical.ly Brooklyn. I sat down to make a list of some favorites and at first it was really hard.
Sure enough, though, one post made me think of another and I came up with something. Here’s a list that I think captures some of the more fun, interesting stuff from nearly two years of daily writing:

• Very early on, we dug into the business model of CommonBond, raising some questions. That led to a meaningful interview with the company’s CEO where we got into those questions more.
• Hanging out with the robots of Red Hook.
• Profiling Brooklyn’s manufacturer of satellite communication devices for oceangoing vessels.
• Following the development of Suneris and BotFactory, two companies that this reporter expects to do very big things down the road.
• Introducing a dev who pivoted her life in the direction of code with the support of a workforce development program.
• Covering the Brooklyn Beta pre-party and introducing a new style of party coverage at Technical.ly, while covering the event itself via Tweets alone.
• Digging deep into Etsy’s status as a B Corp in light of its IPO filing.
• Taking our first deep dive on recruiting tech talent, which helped inform Technical.ly’s first ebook.
• Creating Digital Art Friday (though it proved tougher to keep going than I expected).
• Trying to get all of you to comment on the biggest stories of 2014 on Genius (you didn’t, but I forgive you).
• Sorting out how people make money in open source for enterprise databases, commercial mapping and digitizing old films.
• The breakdown of available commercial real estate.
• Watching what’s becoming a more sophisticated conversation about design thinking within tech — here, here and here.

Thanks for being with me as I basically learned how to be a reporter while you watched. I hope it was fun for all of us.
Thanks for everyone at Technical.ly for permitting me to do this and for putting up with my curmudgeonliness. Thanks to the community for welcoming us to Brooklyn.
I won’t be far. You don’t really leave Technical.ly. Your relationship to it just changes.