Made in Chicago Company Directory

JP's exposition

WebAssembly is going to completely change the web, so I learned a bit about it by compiling a Fluid Solver in WebAssembly . I also used it in a ridiculous programming system: Paper Programs — and having a projector like that led me to make some Projector art .

I wrote On funding medical research , which I’ve thought a lot about recently. I wrote about backing up data in Moving data in 10 minutes . I catalogued some of my favourite works of fiction and non-fiction: Nature of the Universe .

When the Bay Area was all smoky, I made a quick mashup: SF Koyaanisqatsi . When I was learning about security research, I made a Hacker101 CTF walkthrough . I also collected some of my Insta-wisdom . I made a little interactive graphic on the world’s Carbon Budget . And I played a bit with the Jai programming language.

My dissertation in Computer Science was an interactive programming course, jsdares . In the original proposal, A Novel Introduction to Programming , I propose teaching the basics of programming with a real but reduced language, to make possible compiler and interface features that support learning.

I implemented quite a few of such features, as shown in this interactive essay, Peeking under the blindfold , and in more detail in my thesis, jsdares thesis . I also gave a pretty detailed talk, covering most of the learnings and history of the project, Building jsdares . Out of jsdares grew a side project, Visualising Program Execution , which I’ve given a few talks about. I also extracted the code for the robot applet into its own library. I’ve long thought that robots are a great way to learn programming, in part because I enjoyed learning that way myself — see RoboChallenge .

I also tried my hand at teaching functional programming: λ Lessons . It was adapted by Chris Uehlinger using a much superior user interface: bubble wrap! λ Bubble Pop

Finally, I worked on general education software too. In high school I teamed up with my Latin teacher to build Audivididici , an open source program still used by some students in the Netherlands (you can see it in action in the middle of this TV fragment (in Dutch): AVD in the classroom . For another educational project I built a neat converter: word2markdown . And I made a little educational widget about waves .

Public transport is a crucial part of a functioning society. It helps lifting people out of poverty, reducing emissions, fighting traffic, and so on. At Remix I worked on tools for planning and scheduling public transit. I also wrote a bunch of blog posts: Remix’s Tech Stack: Webpack , Preventing Regressions , Remix’s Tech Stack: Jasmine , Request queuing .

For a while I worked on revitalising American democracy at a company called Brigade. I published two engineering blog posts: Don’t pass CSS classes between components and Maintaining scroll positions in all browsers .

I’ve always been interested in politics. In fact, I attended the first hackathon ever to be held in a parliament, where I made a website that showed which political parties in the Netherlands vote the same: Vriendenpolitiek .

In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, some of my friends founded a donation pool, called Vocal Minority , for which I implemented a redesigned website.

When reading, you should see context. You should be able to find out what others say; whether there is any evidence to the claims being made, or if they have been debunked; if there’s new information since the text was written; and so on. With Factlink we set out to solve this, by making a browser extension that lets you add sources and comments to any statement on the web. People could then vote on the quality of sources, which we used to calculate a credibility score for statements. I wrote about this calculation in Factlink’s Fact Graph . Development has mostly stopped, but I started porting some functionality to Annotator.js, the current leading annotation library: Paragraph icons for Annotator.js

Wikipedia is too hard to contribute to, so I made an editing interface that is both usable and works with their crazy parser, which I wrote about in Help, I want to change Wikipedia! . After that I briefly worked for the Wikimedia Foundation, where I contributed to WikiLove , which got lots of media attention.

Sometimes I try to take some pretty pictures. Check out my Oxford pictures ; or computer generated graphics from a Raytracer ; or my Analog highlights of 2010 . After first moving to the United States, I wrote about one of my frustrations, and animated it: Nightmare .

I worked on huge multitouch tables at Cantouch ; created bicycle light art in full colour called PimpMyBike ; built a Briefcase computer , a Photoframe(d) , and a pretty insecure Simple home automation system ; wrote some satire on useless testing, duplication.js ; found some solutions to Self-enumerating pangrams ; wrote about shorter meetings by doing a One-legged standup ; built an online portal for safe swimming in outdoor water for a competition, Zwemmen in Noord-Holland ; built Balloon molecules ; found some Browser bugs ; tried to exploit browsers’ Undefined Behaviour ; made videos for our Last day in high school ; helped out a little bit with usbpicprog . For more lists and bullets, check out my Curriculum Vitæ .

In 2008 I made an instrument out of wine glasses. I took some pictures of the Glass harp construction , and some videos, Auld Lang Syne and Sound of Music . They were seen by two artists who were hired by MTV to create a video with glass harps, and they ended up using my instrument, in Make a big effort to sound like MTV . I also made a silly applet: Musical Glass .

I also like to play the piano, and occasionally record it: Jerry Martin — The Simple Life ; Legend of Zelda ; Philip Glass — Mad Rush ; Philip Glass — Metamorphosis Three ; Linkin Park — Numb ; Pokémon — Elite Four ; and Metal Gear Solid 2 .

I learned to dance with poi, and recorded a simple little routine: Poi on the beach .