From Terminal to Terminal

A developer’s experience on a reporting trip

By Anna Fetter

VSCode opens the same way in the United States as it does in Argentina. So why did I spend nearly a day each way traveling 6,000 miles from Chapel Hill to Buenos Aires?

Well, for one, going on an international trip is an essential in a class called International Projects. It was important I was there for my team as they went out each day to find and film their stories. Secondly, I’ve always wanted to cross the equator. That part ended up being a little anticlimactic. I slept through the entire red-eye flight but still checked a huge item off my bucket list.

The first thing I noticed is how much of a dog city Buenos Aires is! On our way to our first lunch, I saw dogs on balconies and on group walks of at minimum four dogs. I tried to pitch a portrait series called “Dogs of Buenos Aires”, but unfortunately none of the photographers had room in their packed schedules.

I spent the week helping my team, and learning to stay out of the way when needed. I walked around Buenos Aires with Ella as she gathered content for the project’s social media. I went to the San Telmo street market with Emma to photograph a woman and her tattoos in her shop. I fended off geese while Dylan and Pasquale filmed nature shots. I coded in the hostel while everyone else was out chasing stories.

We also got to meet students from Universidad Católica Argentina who helped us find sources and shape our reporting. We walked alongside their riverside campus and held a team meeting in their library. One morning, we visited La Nación, one of Latin America’s most respected news outlets.

Most importantly, I found a place with a massive TV so the whole team could watch the UNC–Duke game together.

Now I’m back in Chapel Hill, locking in during our five-hour weekly work sessions. The website is starting to come together as we connect the front end with the back end and our content management system. The designers are finalizing high-fidelity mockups. The interactive team is pulling data for custom visualizations to run alongside our stories. It looks like our big push—the developer equivalent of the photographers’ and videographers’ big week in Buenos Aires—is just around the corner.