I’m a programmer, speaker, and activist.
I seek deep understanding
so I can create clear explanations
of complex topics.
I wrote about designing a better UI for editing spoken word audio.
Future posts will discuss engineering multiplayer UIs with Automerge and the fun of using hand sketches and LLMs to create software for just a few people.
Fig. Ducking Recreating Sketchpad, the first GUI was a talk at !!con 2024 about what we can learn by studying and rebuilding early user interfaces. Earlier, Constraint programming in the browser at JSConf 2013 covered related ground, alongside a short note on being inspired by Sketchpad and its constraint-oriented UI.
Fig. !!con 2024 <iframe>able finance, presented at Fintech Devcon 2023, shares advice and war stories for building embeddable UIs and SDKs using iframes.
Fig. Fintech Devcon 2023 Pure UI Control is an essay on how teams can communicate and organize their work when building complex UIs. A companion essay, What are the important problems in UI engineering?, sketches the open territory I think the field still hasn’t properly mapped.
Synchronizable abstractions for understandable concurrency is an explanation of the Concurrent ML event system — the small, careful design that later inspired React Fiber.
Fig. CML event sequence Preact in Pictures is a 2017 talk explaining the core virtual DOM diffing algorithm, following the code in Preact but with notes on how it compares to React. The companion Preact Internals series goes deeper. Earlier, in 2014, I gave an early talk on React + Om and wrote an experience report on shipping a ClojureScript wrapper for React.
Fig. Preact lifecycle The new fast is a talk I gave several times in 2016 sharing advanced web performance techniques that were fairly new at the time — HTTP/2, server push, advanced CDN usage, and streaming responses.
Fig. The new fast Day-job software, mostly in narrow specialist domains where the cost of a misunderstanding is high.
From 2011–2017, I primarily worked on in-browser WYSIWYG design tools for websites and images.
A more complete chronological account lives on my LinkedIn profile.
Open-source and volunteer work — small collaborations that tend to outlast the season I spent on them.
Read Japanese Literature is a podcast and blog run by my partner, Alison. I help with the website and sound design.
Fig. readjapaneseliterature.com Pyret is an in-browser programming language and environment used in the Bootstrap curriculum. In 2020 and ’21, I updated their IDE to be shinier, faster, and easier to use.
Federated Wiki is a new, personal version of the wiki being developed by Ward Cunningham. In 2011, I collaborated with him to design and build the core UI paradigm that still powers it today.■
Fig. Smallest Federated Wiki