About me…

I am a developer & designer with a focus on front-end architecture and interaction design. My interests range from UI-design to 80's vintage computers (IBM PCjr, Apple //e, C64) to embedded computing, video codecs, CRTs, and pixel-art.

Until late-2023, I was the Frontend Engineering Lead at Formant where I developed prototypes, tools, and designs for the future of robotic fleet monitoring and teleoperation. I love getting my hands dirty, learning new things, and exploring new domains. To me, there isn't a line between engineering and design; I'm equally comfortable in Sketch as I'm in Sublime Text.

You can find me doodling on CodePen, helping other engineers on StackOverflow, pushing code to GitHub, or posting on Mastodon about stuff I think is cool. To get in touch, e-mail me at j@holmes.codes

Recent Thoughts…

• 2024-08-03
  Adventures in Monorepo Rewriting

  What happens when you get to the "break-things" part of move-fast-and-break-things when dealing with monorepos.

• 2024-08-02
  Why I removed Codepen embeds from my home page…

  During the most recent updates to the site, I decided to remove some embeds to some of the more popular Codepen pens that I've done through the years. Why?

• 2024-05-31
  Reconstructing Tyler Hobbs’ Watercolor Effect

  Using "TypeScript to recreate Tyler Hobbs' polygon watercolor effect."

• 2024-05-16
  Understanding lerp()

  A lerp()—or linear-interpolation—is a function that returns a new value between two known samples.

• 2023-11-08
  Destiny 2: Season of the Witch - Final "Imbaru Engine" Puzzle

  The finale of the most recent Season of the Witch did not disappoint, let's talk about the Imbaru Engine puzzle in Destiny 2.

Code & Links…

• @watercolorizer/watercolorizer

  Watercolorizer is a tiny graphics library for creating generative watercolor-like shapes from simple polygonal base-shapes. This core library is un-opinionated about the rendering process and instead focuses on the generative algorithm for constructing the paths to be rendered.

  See all @watercolorizer packages on npmjs.

• CSS 3½″ Floppy Diskettes Sketch

  

• github.com/32bitkid/mpeg

  An experimental/educational pure‑Go MPEG‑2 decoder.

• @4bitlabs/sci0

  JavaScript library and data‑structures for parsing and manipulating SCI0 resources from classic Sierra On‑Line adventure games.

  See all @4bitlabs packages on npmjs.

• 60% Keyboard Sketch

  

• github.com/32bitkid/bitreader

  Provides basic interfaces to read and traverse an io.Reader as a stream of bits, rather than a stream of bytes.

• Tribute to a BASIC classic