Since 2020, I've been teaching myself game development with Unity and have been working on Novantica, a sci-fi adventure game, set in a futuristic urban open world where time travel is common, god-like AI govern the world, and a mysterious event has disrupted the city. You can wishlist Novantica on Steam.
Over the years, I've worked on several open source projects that helped defined modern approaches to styling front end applications. Starting in 2013, I worked with Adam Morse and John Otander on CSS Stats, a web application to statically analyze a site's CSS. In 2015, I created Basscss, the first atomic/utility-based CSS framework that helped popularize using multiple classnames on a single element to style HTML. Basscss used a small set of theme values for font-size, color palettes, margin and padding scales, and more, which is now common practice in front end design systems. If you've seen (or cursed at) code that looks like `class="block mb2 blue"`, then you've seen my work. In 2017, I released v1 of Rebass (also my first time on Hacker News), a library of stateless functional React components with styling, which helped introduce the concept of styled UI components in React. Extracting the utility style props from Rebass, I created Styled System in 2017. In 2019, I released Theme UI, an extension of these ideas that provided utilities for dark mode, styling content in MDX, and a universal `sx` prop to style elements inline with theme-based values.
I've also worked on various other open source projects. I created MDX Deck as a simple way to make slide presentations with MDX. Helped John Otander with the conceptual design and syntax of MDX, a combination of markdown and JSX. Created several color tools, including Colorable for testing color contrast, Palx, Spectral, and Hello Color. SVG-related tools, including Loading, Geomicons, Microicon, Paths, and Reline.
As a retired DJ, I also produce electronic music, previously running a project called Microbeats, in which each track was created in one hour or less. I am one-half of MrsJxn, a collaboration with Adam Morse. I also dabble with interactive music apps like Skullcat. Checkout my SoundCloud.
I am currently working as a design engineer at Val Town. Previously, I worked at Gatsby JS, Priceline, The Grid, Etsy, Kickstarter, Stitch Fix, Living Social, and Opower. I studied sociology, Japanese language, and graphic design at Marshall University.