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 division between engineering and design; I’m equally comfortable in Sketch as I’m in Sublime Text.

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

Recent Thoughts…

• 3 August 2024
  Adventures in Monorepo Rewriting

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

• 2 August 2024
  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?

• 31 May 2024
  Reconstructing Tyler Hobbs’ Watercolor Effect

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

• 16 May 2024
  Understanding Lerp()

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

• 8 November 2023
  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 other @watercolorizer packages on npmx.

• 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 other @4bitlabs packages on npmx.

• 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