This is the latest of a long series of redesigned home pages. I can now admit to myself that I'm never going to blog regularly, so why have a blogging site with a bunch of stale articles? So instead, I've created a very simple HTML page that is quick to load, impossible to hack, and requires no maintenance. And is completely accessible.
I've been a professional programmer since 1982. Really! And I could write a long paragraph about how primitive everything was back then, but you wouldn't be interested. I've worked with lots of different technologies - FORTRAN, BASIC, various assembly languages for firmware, Pascal, C, C++, Windows, and finally "the web".
The following is my current focus:
This is an open source library for creating sheet music in a browser. I started this out of curiosity and it just grew from there. When the project started, I needed to support IE6. More about abcjs.
This is my day job, and a really interesting project! It is a teaching tool for reading sheet music and can be used for a few other types of musical practice. I did the front end using Vue.
Like many programmers, I'm really interested in music. I'm not sure why there is such a strong link between music and programming, but my theory is that there are lots of similarities: they both require lots of practice, they both use a lot of pattern recognition, they both work best when you are "in the flow", they both require lots of focused alone time, they both require lots of persistence, they both have an endless capacity for improvement, they both require a lifetime of learning.
Anyway, I'm kind of a full-stack musician: since I'm an amateur I've dabbled in lots of different styles and instruments over the decades. I play fiddle, accordion, mandolin, tenor banjo, and guitar, plus I've got other instruments in the works! I generally like traditional dance music of many kinds. I play Appalachian old time, 1920s Trad Jazz, Cajun, Klezmer, and contradance music. Plus other styles in the works!
See the sidebarbelow for a list of some of my musical projects.
In the last few years I've come to appreciate visual design a lot. I've always been concerned with UX design - getting the right buttons and info on the right pages - but I've never thought I could do the drawing, layout and colors. I've been studying a bit and am getting more confidence. This web page, and all my other hobby sites were designed by me.
And, related to design is accessibility. I'm usually the one to push for accessibility testing and fixes. Accessibility helps all of us, at least a little, and some of us a whole lot!