JohnJonesFour

My rocketship playhouse was featured on Make's Substack!

In this video I walk through my full f-stop printing workflow—from the very first ½-stop test strip, to refining exposure in ⅛-stop steps, and finally shaping the image with dodging and burning in stops instead of seconds.

What happens when your son watches Apollo 13 on repeat and asks for a rocket ship?

I completely rebuilt the back wall of my workbench — and the result is a fully custom pegboard system packed with storage for electronics, tools, and all my photography + videography gear.

Take imaginative play to the next level 🚀!

Welcome to my film photography sanctuary — a custom-built darkroom with a DIY ESP32-powered development timer at its heart.

Transforming a dusty spare room into a full-blown home movie theater?

My office has plenty of great toys, but it was missing something important: a stylish clock.

If you’re going to build a Time Machine into a car (or truck), why not do it with some style?

Abridged Transcript: # I absolutely love film photography.

Abridged Transcript: # From a pretty young age my son loved trains, and I’ll admit that I do too.

A few weeks ago, I came across an intriguing article on IEEE Spectrum featuring a Raspberry Pi sky time-lapse project.

What’s the best way to overcomplicate grilling?

Developing is just subjecting exposed film or paper to a series of chemical reactions.

It's been a while since I wrote a fun bot, so on Sunday evening I cracked my knuckles, set up a new repo and wrote a bot I've been thinking about for a little while: a "pep talk" generator themed after Apple's hit show Ted Lasso and a cool pep talk genera…

I recently joined NOVAAR, Northern Virginia Association of Rocketry so that I could have consistent access to a launch site and so I could learn from the club's members to grow my own skill.

Experiencing any sort of data loss makes you paranoid about backing up.

Since first blogging about this project last year, I've gone through several iterative improvements of the platform, and so I'd like to share the latest and greatest on this project.

When I asked the woman behind the counter in the hobby shop for a pack of Estes E12-6 motors, she responded with: "Oh you must be one of those serious model rocket guys?!"

Q&A on Hacker News about this project As we're driving out to our launch site in Leesburg, VA, my wife turns to me and asks, "did you intentionally wear a yellow and blue striped rugby shirt to match your yellow and blue striped rocket?"

Q&A on Hacker News about this project It seems like everyone's getting back into old hobbies in the time of COVID-19.

My first job as a software developer, as it is for many, was as an intern.

The broader Javascript packaging ecosystem has evolved greatly in the past several years.

There's a common refrain in software among engineers when they see a product that interests them: "I could build that."

Me in the highlands of Scotland doing some landscape photography.

There's a small, but growing, niché of nerds out there who enjoy an activity aptly-named vintage computing or sometimes retrocomputing.

I love the open source community not just for it's ability to unite developers and other technologists around common interests and problems but also because it is a showcase of what everyone - from beginners up to the masters - are exploring.

From Stanford Social Innovation Review: It is increasingly important that any serious enterprise—whether startup, media brand, government agency, foundation, or nonprofit organization—have access to cutting edge, reliable, and useful digital tools that ex…

From the Case Foundation blog: The Case Foundation has worked over the last two years with data partners ImpactSpace and Crunchbase to develop the Impact Investing Network Map, an interactive tool showcasing the publicly available transactions between com…

Doomsday Machine is a tool for backing up cloud services to a local machine.

Apple’s unveiling of their augmented reality development tool, AR Kit, at the World Wide Developer Conference is an indicator that they see the future of augmented reality being much stronger than the future of virtual reality.

I've constructed a new version of Doomsday Machine based on other backup tools and coordinated all in a Docker image.

There has been a need in the ever-expanding universe of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for some unifying factor.

Open standards and a common communication protocol is needed if we expect devices to truly bring value in the world of the Internet of Things in the future.

I received a Christmas gift in fourth grade that profoundly impacted my career path and thus the rest of my life.

With having _theInitialCommit rolling and making a personal goal to write more, I was unhappy with the grammar checking tools available in the open source community.

The big holiday gift of the season seems to have been the Amazon Echo Dot.

_theInitialCommit was featured on the site TechNative this week.

In hindsight of this election, there have been countless articles on how social media, so much more than ever before, affected the outcome of the race.

Virtually all developers rely on open source software as part of their daily lives.

This is a simple Mongoose frontend that can be built into a pre-existing Express application.

This is a small data collector and visualization that scans the Twitter API for tweets from presidential candidates, analyzes the N-grams of the tweets, and renders the most popular n-grams based on frequency.

My latest project, BackupTool, has really taken off.

My best friend, John Allen, worked with a videographer to produce this amazing documentary about his non-profit, Sweaters & Sustenance.

Update (1/3/15): I've also built a Mac status bar app that displays the backup progress of the tool.

Content Science Review recently featured an article co-authored by my colleague Jessica Mancari and myself.

Chef's Hat was featured on the lifestyle blog Lifehacker last weekend.

All mobile developers, entrenched in either the Android or iOS camps, have always been skeptical of new cross-platform development tools that offer performance and quality just like natively-developed code.

Chef's Hat was featured on the local blog ArlNow as part of the site's regular feature on local startups: A Courthouse resident has created an app to help people save recipes they find online.

I've been a Drupal site developer for a number of years, and I've always enjoyed the quality and robustness of the Drupal contributed module community.