Josh On Design

It’s a truism of the web that when something becomes free it turns to crap. This is largely due to advertising, tracking, and SEO hackers getting their crappy version of something to the top of the search index. When this has happened to a tool I want to use I can’t fix the underlying problem, but I can make my own non-tracking version and share it with the web, doing my little part to make the world a better place. Today it’s a CSS Text Style builder.

I’ve been teaching my nephew to code for the past few years and we did a game jam together over the winter break. He said to me: “Uncle Josh, you sure can code fast.” I reminded him that I’ve been programming for 30+ years, and one day he’ll be even better than I am.

I’m happy to finally release a Javascript library I wrote at least four years ago. (I say ‘at least’ because the last commit was 4 years ago, but I don’t remember when or where I wrote the original code it came from). Presenting the parser from TallyCat!

tiny tracker

thoughts on build systems

I'm rebuilding my HTML Canvas Deep Dive book so I need a way to compile various source files into a final thing. I'm not producing an executable but rather a directory full of generated HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and possibly some other stuff; but it's the same basic idea. I need to turn a collection of things into another collection of things. I need a build system. So which should I use?

Today we are going to take a break from creative procedural generation and talk about a very useful graphics primitive, the Bézier curve, and learn how to render it from scratch.

Following Blair MacIntyre's lead, I've accepted that the only way to write more is to write more. No more waiting for the perfect topic at the perfect time with perfect editing. It's better to publish something unpolished than to not publish at all.

Semantic-Editor-JS (hereafter called SE), is a new open source library for building rich text editors. You can play with the demo or get the code on Github.

I have a problem. Sometimes I get something into my head and it sticks there, taunting me, until I do something about it. Much like the stupid song stuck in your brain, you must play the song to be released from it's grasp. So it is with software.

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.