Since 2022 I have worked for the
Oregon Bee Atlas to help landowners understand plant-pollinator
interactions and guide their land use decisions including evaluation of seed mixes, as well as supporting their
volunteers' observation work. I have implemented the
Melittoflora tool using a provisional version
of the [Infusion](/infusion) framework which filters the project's data on wild bees by geographical, temporal and taxonomic filters and
visualises the resulting interactions as a live, attractive bipartite ribbon graph.
Since 2008 I have been the lead developer of the Infusion framework, a JavaScript framework supporting the development of flexible software. Versions 1 through 4 of Infusion were relatively conventionally structured libraries supporting the development of various UI widgets. Since 2024 a comprehensive rewrite of Infusion has been underway for version 6 based on reactive primitives throughout, structuring it as a software substrate constituting an integration domain.
In 2012 I was lucky enough to work with the late great Mike Eisenberg
to produce an incarnation of Hal Abelson and Andy diSessa's
spherical turtle concept
to run on NOAA's Science on a Sphere planetarium system. I wrote WebGL
shader code to rasterise
spherical polygons into the ECE projection system accepted by the projectors and worked on a Logo-like language to invoke it. You can
try out an in-browser implementation of WebLogo here.
From 2010 to 2020 I was core framework architect for the GPII
(now Morphic), an autopersonalization project aiming to automatically adapt technology to meet the
needs and preferences of users. A description of our architecture and goals appeared in a HCI 2014 paper.
Early deployments of the RSF framework were the twinned Darwin Online and
Wallace Online projects. Darwin Online is the world's largest resource on Charles Darwin
and has served over a billion documents since being deployed in 2006, despite not receiving external funding since 2008
(when the codebase was last updated). It exemplifies the "plain documents" ethic of our movement and is managed via CSV files and HTML exports from DreamWeaver
rather than a heavyweight CMS.
My first outing in the space of web technologies, RSF
(2005-2008) was an unusual kind of Java framework which developed a dialect
of logic-free HTML templates against a backend
of demand-driven dataflow defined in the
Spring configuration format.
The intention was to leverage the then-prevalent ecosystem of plain HTML authoring tools such as Dreamweaver
in a strategy whose faults are written up in my 2021 PPIG paper on Markup-driven polymorphism.