~jrc/
Hello, world :)
Me on the Web
Areas of Interest / Stuff I’ve Done
- Learning Programming
- I grew up programming in Applesoft BASIC, Logo, and HyperCard (R.I.P.). I was a huge Apple fanboy and bought into the notion of personal computers as “bicycles for the mind”, as a form of empowerment and liberation. I read about Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC and Macintosh team, which opened my eyes to the radical idea of software as a new medium for human creativity and expression. I decided I wanted to study computer science, but never did I get interested in solving business problems or working in so-called IT.
- At Carnegie Mellon University, I was one of the first undergrad researchers in Brad Myers’ Natural Programming Project. One day, we went to a local elementary school and presented children with diagrams that we made of Pac-Man in different scenarios, to see how they would express those programming concepts in their own words. The results were eventually written up as “Studying the language and structure in
non-programmers’ solutions to programming problems” (2001). At the same time, I got a bit disillusioned with the field of HCI, which I felt was trying to legitimize itself by being all quantitative and formal. I was always curious how Steve Jobs managed to create products that both looked and worked great, while shunning usability studies, not to mention other established software engineering methodologies.
- As a student, I volunteered at WQED Pittsburgh, which was next to CMU campus. One day I stepped into the elevator and found myself face-to-face with Mister Rogers. I didn’t know what to do except stare at my feet. As the doors opened and I scampered out, he looked directly at me, smiled warmly, and said, “Make it good”.
- Working at Apple (1999-2008)
- I got incredibly lucky. During the time I was in university, Apple almost went bankrupt but didn’t. Instead, it bought NeXT, and with that came Steve Jobs. After months and months of doing everything I possibly could, I got my dream job at Apple in 1999. I was thrilled to get the chance to work on unifying Macintosh and Unix, both of which I loved but were two very different worlds and cultures. Back then, I remember engineers and designers hashing out problems like the role of filename extensions, and heated arguments about resource forks and binary executable formats. The NeXT way won in most cases, as the NeXT team was running the show and quite pragmatically decided that Apple, with 5% or whatever market share, had to be the one to adapt to the rest of the world.
- The first task that I was assigned at Apple was getting Mozilla to build and run well on Mac OS X. Mac OS X didn’t have any native apps yet, and Bertrand wanted some real-world code to exercise the APIs which were still under development. This work resulted in Fizzilla.
- Being the snot-nosed new college grad, one of my side tasks was to help prep the demo machines for Macworld Expo, the ones for the Stevenotes. I was literally sitting up there on stage, the day before the keynote, ftp’ing builds and patching the demo machine with bug fixes from Cupertino. I watched in awe as Steve Jobs rehearsed his lines.
- I also worked on Music Player.app, which showed its face in Mac OS X Public Beta before being quickly killed off by iTunes for Mac OS X.
- As a corn-fed boy from Indiana where nothing ever happens, it was surreal to be living in Silicon Valley and seeing places and people that I had only heard about in books and newspapers. I ended up living in downtown Palo Alto for a few years. Elon Musk had an apartment literally two doors away, but this was before he was so famous. Sometimes, I would spot Steve Jobs on Apple campus. He was usually walking around with Jony Ive, but sometimes he was alone. Once I was in line for sushi in the cafeteria and noticed a commotion. I looked up and the sushi chef was shaking with nervousness. I looked to my right and there was Steve Jobs, who was smiling. “I’m just another customer,” he said, trying to reassure her. Some years later, I spotted another hero, Doug Engelbart, walking with someone else at the Stanford Shopping Center. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what, plus he was looking a bit frail.
- There were plenty of secret projects at Apple, big and small. One big one was the Aqua user interface that was revealed at Macworld Expo in January 2000. When we were first disclosed, we weren’t even supposed to reveal the existence of the project. Then, after getting access to the code, we had to keep our office doors locked and windows covered at all times. There was a rumor that screenshots would have tracking codes hidden in them, to dissuade leaking. For some years, I worked on the OS Installer and Setup Assistant, and so we would get access to new hardware, usually in mostly final form, but sometimes in prototype plexiglass form. We had to keep them literally locked up in a closet. I remember getting to see the iBook and MacBook Air before the world did.
- In around 2004, I was unofficially asked to help hack Mac OS X to work on a prototype touchscreen tablet computer. This was not an iPad, as the article claims, but rather the guts of an iBook hacked into a tablet form factor, with a touchscreen and flash storage instead of a hard drive. I remember deleting Java, printer drivers, fonts, etc. to get a standard Mac OS X installation to fit on the smaller flash drive. I also wrote a little tool that used the CoreGraphics API to make a huge cursor on the screen that looked like the iMac hockey puck mouse, so you could drag it around the screen with your finger and click, because none of the existing Mac software was designed with touch-sized targets.
- It was a tough decision, but I left California in 2005 to pursue a masters degree in Science and Technology Studies in Europe. I tried to quit, but my manager convinced me to take a leave of absence. So I was still in contact with Apple during the masters program, and I started hearing about a big “black hole” secret project that was sucking in people from all over software engineering. I decided to not pursue a Ph.D but return to Cupertino, and it was hinted that I would also join the secret project. But when I did return, they told me that my old team really needed help, since it had been gutted due to the black hole. So I agreed to re-join my old team, on the condition that I could work on something different. The black hole, in turned out, was the famed Project Purple. Of course, had I known, I would have stayed at Apple all along. Then again, I had done a similar multi-year slog with the Mac OS X project already.
- Would I go back there today? No. The Apple I knew and loved is gone. Here’s some more thoughts on the current state of Apple’s software. Also, “been there, done that”.
- Coffee (2000s)
- After moving to Silicon Valley, I would meet up with a friend from high school who lived in a neighboring city. One Sunday evening, we decided to meet up at a Starbucks, only to arrive and find that it was closed. (This was before smartphones and Google Maps.) We tried another Starbucks, and it was also closed. After giving up, we both decided to drive home and start researching espresso machines online, so we could each have one at home. I ordered a Rancilio Silvia espresso machine, paired with a Rancilio Rocky ginder (later replaced by a Mazzer Mini grinder), and went down the rabbit hole of coffee nerdery and snobbery. Here’s a how-to guide that I wrote in 2002: “Rancilio Silvia Espresso HOWTO”
- During this phase of my life, I shunned Starbucks coffee. I remember that an owner of an indie coffee shop poo-pooed Starbucks, saying that they sell more milk than coffee, so they should be known as a dairy company instead of a coffee company. But in 2006, I visited China for the first time. After hours of city tourism, going to a place with 1) proper coffee, 2) comfortable chairs, 3) free Wi-Fi, 4) sitting toilets with toilet paper, and 5) a solace from cigarette smoke and air pollution was heaven. So it was in China that I gained a true appreciation for Starbucks. Also, I think their coffee got also better after Howard Schultz returned as CEO, and they shedded their “Charbucks” reputation.
- I didn’t bring Silvia (and Mazzer Mini) with me when I moved to Sweden, only due to the fact that they’re made for North American 120V / 60Hz voltage. Instead, embracing local cultural norms, I switched to making filter drip coffee at home. I typically use Melitta or Hario V60 filter cones. I also started buying normal supermarket coffee (but still whole bean that I grind with my Wilfa Grinder). Today I’d call myself a reformed coffee snob. I find that I appreciate specialty coffee more when it’s a treat, rather than an everyday occurance.
- TODO
- Skype (2008–2015)
- I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. Of course it’s sad to see Skype go from becoming a verb (up there in terms of brand value with Xerox, Kleenex, Band-Aid) to a has-been within a handful of years. IMHO, Skype died because the OG widely successful Skype was fundamentally peer-to-peer. There were no servers, only supernodes.
- After smartphones took off, management was very reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model. I think there were legitimate business reasons: Simply put, running servers costs $$$, and Skype’s business model was based on calling out to PSTN. It wouldn’t have made business sense. But also the P2P tech (which Skype didn’t actually own, but licensed from the founders, to eBay’s surprise) was seen by the old-guard as the crown jewels.
- Internally, there were teams putting Skype in the cloud, but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don’t get me started about that… upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before finally biting the bullet.
- By then, the A/V calling tech became commoditized. Free alternatives (FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) appeared on the scene, with others business models. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but also (for better/worse) slow and cautious to introduce ads in the UI.
- So as easy as it would be to say that Skype (pre-Microsoft, I mean) should have done things differently, it’s not clear to me how. It would have needed to swap out its business model AND technical architecture at the same time.
- Permaculture & Urban Agriculture (2011–2015)
- Visual Recipes & Grocery E-Commerce (2016)
- Portugal (2017–2019)
- Horticulture & Vertical Farming (2019–2023)
- FoodTBD (2023)
- MenuDB - a project by my cousin and me to transcribe, translate, and digitize Chinese restaurant menus
- Pickles (2023)
- TODO
- Pickle John’s - a project by a colleague and me to make New York-style fermented kosher dill pickle DIY kits
- visual D.I.Y. recipe [PDF] and instructions [PDF]
- Software as a Medium
More, older stuff: https://web.archive.org/web/20100311031043/http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib
FAQ
Why the “plus”?
When I was at Carnegie Mellon University, the email system did fuzzy common name matching by default, so you could write a person’s name e.g. harry.bovik@andrew.cmu.edu and it would try to deliver it to the right mailbox. If you added a plus sign (+), the system would do an exact username match instead of a fuzzy match, i.e. the + character makes it unambiguous. So in practice, I was jrc+, and it stuck.