What's new?

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on this blog. Most of my creative output has been focused elsewhere, on non-blogging activities. I figured it was time to add some kind of content to my blog. So here’s what I’ve been working on recently (where recently means “since I last published here”).

Audio programming

Once upon a time I was going to be a recording engineer, and I spent four years learning all about audio and recording and music. I ended up not using my degree, but recently I’ve been reuniting my two passions of programming and music/audio.

  • Sample.js - Set sample trigger points in a song and trigger them using the keyboard
  • tonegame - A game where you guess the tone(s) being played
  • Cissy - This project shows how music can be created by triggering samples at different points in a song (Cissy Strut by The Meters)
  • Eagles - Randomly generated notes from the chords of Hotel California by The Eagles (in 11/8)
  • DFT - A visualization to help me learn how the discrete fourier tranform works
  • Video - A gif-based video I made for the song that’s partially created in Cissy
  • Ring - Playing with ring modulation

Easy 6502

Almost 3 years ago I wrote a free online ebook called Easy 6502. It started life as a series of unpublished blog posts on this book, but as it got longer I realized it needed to be its own standalone thing, with an embedded simulator for running the 6502 assembly code. It ended up being super popular, and I’m very proud of it.

The simulator from Easy 6502

JavaScript for Kids

Some time after writing Easy 6502 I was approached by No Starch Press to write a book on JavaScript for kids. I agreed, and 2 years later (after many late nights) JavaScript for Kids was printed and in my hands. One of the most exciting things about the whole thing was that my illustrator ended up being Miran Lipovača, author of one of my favorite programming books, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!.

Other music/tech stuff

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with my LittleBits Synth Kit - here are some creations of mine.