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 .
Stuff from my teens. Uninteresting to most, a trip down memory lane for me. Small electronics projects Climate change CD Rubik’s cube personal record Laser tag system Old websites GravityFun.swf Klassenzimmer WLG Wubbo Ockels My very first website Magnet battery copper wire spinner Laminar Flow Grades Calculator Elektronensoep Tuinkersplantjes