Josh On Design

Hi. My name is Josh Marinacci. You might remember me from the webOS Developer Relations team. Despite what happened under HP, webOS is still my favorite operating system. It still has the best features of any OS and an amazing group of dedicated, passionate fans. I deeply cherish the two years I spent traveling the world telling everyone about the magic of webOS.

After over a year of living with my custom built blog system I'd finally had enough last weekend. Time for something new. Something less buggy. Something extensible. So I took a day and rewrote it from scratch.

Recent Projects

• 8 part blog series on building a web browser from scratch in 100% Rust.
• AminoGFX-GL: an Javascript hardware accelerated scenegraph for the RaspberryPi. (see this screenshot I made a few years ago).
• PureImage: a 100% pure Javascript implementation of HTML canvas for use on the server with Node. Supports JPG, PNG, and TTF fonts. Use it for server side image resizing, unit testing, or rendering into gigantic offscreen bitmaps.
• SideDeck: realtime HTML presentation framework. Try it here.
• Silly.io: The Ministry of Silly Things, an open source wikipedia for computable data.
• Brainshell-Parser: parser for a unit based calculator. See it live here.
• AMX: yet another node process manager.
• MeowLang, a simple programming language built from the ground up on Ohm. Written for this blog series on how to build your own language in under 200 lines of code.
• Razzmaster: CLI program to find and configure headless Raspberry Pis on your local network.
• URLExpander: a super tiny URL expander written in Node + Express.
• PixelEater: a web-based pixel drawing tool with layers, palettes, zoom, and eyedropper.
• Pixel Font Metrics Editor:
• XmasCard 2016: a retro JRPG comedy Christmas card.

Older Projects (mostly dead)

• FontSlicer: render glyphs from Font-Awesome and other icon fonts as PNGs, with selected color and font size. All client side. Shows off PNG and zip file manipulation in the browser.
• photonsh: a simple shell implemented in pure JS. See the blog post for details.
• HexCanvas: draw pixels, turns into hex code for Adafruit LED matrixes.
• BabyCad Plate: simple tool to position holes in a flat plate, then download an STL for 3D printing.
• BoxMatic: simple browser CAD app to make a box w/ holes in it for 3D printing. Shows 3D rendering using OpenJSCad. Does 2D rendering with Amino.
• ANT task to bundle of Java 6 (not Java 7) apps as desktop executables. github project
• Flying Saucer: Pure Java CSS 2.1 HTML renderer. I haven't worked on it in a while, but there's still a community around it. Good for rendering PDFs. code, Wikipedia Page
• Leonardo Sketch: a desktop drawing tool. written in java.
• Arduino X: Java: alternative IDE for Arduino, rewritten from the ground up. github project
• Electron: Alternative IDE for Arduino, written with Atom Shell. No longer in development. Github repo.
• Javadocs 2020: an early attempt to reinvent JavaDocs

I have written countless articles and blogs, spoken at many developer conferences, and written three books. This is a sample of my work.

I am Josh Marinacci: manager, developer advocate, software engineer, researcher, usability expert, and general miscreant. I have a passion for great user experiences. I live in Oregon with my wife and kiddo. I'm currently helping to keep the Web open and free at Mozilla. I also write bad sci-fi short stories.

SparqEE's Cell is a just launched Kickstarter project to build a GSM data module ready to integrate with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or any other embedded hardware kit. In addition to the cellular board they are also offering SIM cards with discount data service; a first in the projects I've looked at.

So I been thinking. Design comes in waves. First it was page curls and drop shadows. Then came glossy buttons and wet floors, followed by shiny badges and rough textures. Today 'flat' is the leading trend in UI design. It certainly defines the look of Web ’13. Even Apple has jumped on the bandwagon. But what comes next? Where do we go from here? Whither 2014?

Lately I've been experimenting with Functional Reactive Programming, or FRP. There are several good libraries to use FRP with Javascript. I chose Bacon.js. I'm finding FRP to be very useful but hard to understand.

By what standard should we measure if code is "beautiful"? I argue it should be not lines or speed, but rather conciseness and clarity. Can someone who is not familiar with the language still understand what the algorithm does? Can someone not familiar with the task still get a feel for how it works? This metric favors shorter code over longer, but not at the expense of readability. Beautiful code should be as close to expressing the underlying algorithm as possible. How close is the actual code to the most straight forward pseudo code?

I've always wanted a magic wordprocessor. Something that helps me organize my thoughts and build ideas organically, rather than spend all of my time worrying about formatting. Something for the internet / cloud age. Given that Microsoft Word hasn't fundamentally changed in over a decade (or possibly two), we aren't likely to get such software from them. Instead, I decided to play around with some ideas using my new favorite programming tool: OMeta.

Animation is just moving something over time. The rate at which the something moves is defined by a function called an easing equation or interpolation function. It is these equations which make something move slowly at the start and speed up, or slow down near the end. These equations give animation a more life like feel. The most common set of easing equations come from Robert Penner's book and webpage.

Software Libraries are good. They allow abstraction and encapsulation; which encourages reuse. They also allow the library to be written by one person and used by another. This is reuse at the programmer level, not just the system level. A library can be written by a person who has domain expertise but used by someone else who has less or no expertise in that domain. For example: an XML parser. The implementer knows the XML spec inside and out, but the user of the lib needs only a basic understanding of XML in order to use the lib.

In my hunt for what's next I've been reading a lot of books lately. A lot of books. As part of my search I decided to hunt down some of the classics in the computer science field that I'd missed over the years. First articles, then research papers, and some Alan Kay work. That led me to a book I'd always meant to read but never found the time: Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert.

The idea of computer vision has always fascinated me. The ability to get from a plain image to an understanding of it's contents seems magical. Though I understand a bit of the underlying math, to build my own computer vision system would take years of study. Fortunately, this book and an open source library come to the rescue.

Below are my three main session proposals for OSCON, plus a few random ideas near the bottom that aren't fleshed out. Please give me some feedback on what you like and don't like. My goal is to have four really solid submissions. Thanks!

Progress comes not from inventing new answers, but from discovering new questions. -- some guy

The call for proposals for OSCON 2013 just went out. OSCON is the one conference I try to speak at every year because the topics are so diverse and interesting. And being just up the road in Portland doesn't hurt either. However, I'm having trouble deciding what to submit. Too many things interest me. So I thought I'd consult the wisdom of the crowd. What do you want to see?

Much like a painter or musician, sometimes I an idea forms in my head and will not let me rest until it comes out. Usually such an idea is an algorithm or graphics demo, but this time it came in the form of a game; a game which will not quiet until born.

Most book publishers don't really have a 'brand'. You buy a book because of the title or the author. No one cares who Stephen King's publisher is. However, every now and then a publisher comes along who simply makes cool books. A publisher who's books I will buy regardless of the title or author. No Starch Press is one such publisher.

Last night I declared Internet Bankruptcy.