notes.jordanscales.com

Flashcards the hard way Home 🌙 Flashcards the hard way 6 September 2026 I have 2,291 Japanese flashcards in Anki as of today.

Rogue agents Home 🌙 Rogue agents An excerpt from a piece I was recently interviewed about regarding two rogue agents hacking into the server of a Fortune 100 company.

Game of Life Tower Home 🌙 Game of Life Tower This sketch renders Conway’s Game of Life with a twist, each generation is a column on an ever-growing stack.

Discs Home 🌙 Discs This shader renders three discs that can be controlled by moving your mouse or tapping the screen.

Estimates Home 🌙 Estimates I recently called two of my best engineers into my office to chat about estimates.

Epicycles Home 🌙 Epicycles This piece renders glowing points running along two joined circles.

Interference Home 🌙 Interference This sketch shows an interference pattern between two waves: one centered at the origin pulsing at 15Hz, and one centered at the position of the mouse at 20Hz Toggle shader source \ Interference waves Remix this :: wave (…

Complex Home 🌙 Complex This sketch plots y=x3+0.5y = x^3 + 0.5y=x3+0.5 on the complex plane Toggle shader source \ Complex functions Remix this :: <complex> ( a b -- c ) a b vec2 ; :: real>> ( c -- a ) c .x ; :: imag>> ( c -- b ) c .y ; :: c+ ( a b -- c…

ShaderStack Home 🌙 ShaderStack I’ve been working on a Concatenative Programming Language which compiles to GLSL for writing fragment shaders.

I recently sat down for coffee with one of my oldest friends in the industry Home 🌙 I recently sat down for coffee with one of my oldest friends in the industry I recently sat down for coffee with one of my oldest friends in the industry.

It’s just a website Home 🌙 It’s just a website Show up, learn, help others, make people laugh, hone your craft.

Where I put my money Home 🌙 Where I put my money I work in New York City as a Software Engineer.

Credit card rewards points Home 🌙 Credit card rewards points When you swipe your credit card to pay for dinner, the credit card company charges the restaurant a few percentage points – essentially a fee for the service of moving money around quickly and r…

My career as a series of emails Home 🌙 My career as a series of emails I met with a new colleague at Notion last week and our conversation started with my career history.

French House Home 🌙 French House French house (sometimes called “Filter house” and part of the “French touch” supergenre) is my favorite type of music by a wide margin.

Reflections on 98.css Home 🌙 Reflections on 98.css On April 16, 2020 I wrote the first commit for what would become 98.css.

I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next Home 🌙 I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next I originally wrote this post on Medium in 2016.

Let’s make a web server Home 🌙 Let’s make a web server The net module, which ships with Node.js, can be used to create TCP servers and clients.

Rosalind #2: Transcribing DNA into RNA Home 🌙 Rosalind #2: Transcribing DNA into RNA An RNA string is a string formed from the alphabet containing 'A', 'C', 'G', and 'U'.

Rosalind #1: Counting DNA Nucleotides Home 🌙 Rosalind #1: Counting DNA Nucleotides A string is simply an ordered collection of symbols selected from some alphabet and formed into a word; the length of a string is the number of symbols that it contains.

Euler #1: Multiples of 3 or 5 Home 🌙 Euler #1: Multiples of 3 or 5 Let’s solve Euler #1 (https://projecteuler.net/problem=1) in BQN.

BQN Home 🌙 BQN I’ve been learning the array language BQN (https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/index.html), which is a an array language designed and developed by Marshall Lochbaum, previously of Dyalog. 🔗 Articles Here are some posts I’m writing in BQN, simil…

Prime streams Home 🌙 Prime streams This is a continuation of my post Operating on infinite lists which walks you through writing a primitive “Stream” datatype to represent infinite lists of values.

Away Messages Home 🌙 Away Messages Over the past few days I’ve been working on my love letter to instant messaging – away.jordanscales.com.

What comes next?

Handcrafted emoji Home 🌙 Handcrafted emoji In JavaScript, strings can contain emoji.

How to invent reactive JavaScript Home 🌙 How to invent reactive JavaScript Web applications are filled with state and effectively managing and updating that state has more solutions than problems.

network Home 🌙 network I really wanted to build a piece of art with a bunch of tangled edges on it.

epicycles Home 🌙 epicycles I wanted to make a piece on double pendulums, but I thought something more Have you had two different menu symmetrical like a spirograph would be better.

automata Home 🌙 automata It was only a matter of time before I made some hashart based on Elementary cellular automata.

fifteen Home 🌙 fifteen seed values A visualization of the famous Fifteen puzzle, where the hash of the input is used to move the tiles around. 🔗 Layout A lot of these pieces work on canvases of all sizes and shapes (as long as they’re rectangular).

turing Home 🌙 turing A visualization of a 3-symbol, 3-state Turing machine. seed values 🔗 Details The input turing complete hashes to the following: 66a77509eaf0d8589812c53dacb80ebb5f98f16dc06b6ae65f3bd67a5a00937e We divvy this hash up into several parame…

A blueprint for large numbers Home 🌙 A blueprint for large numbers Consider a modest function “A,” which takes a number and adds one to it.

Operating on infinite lists Home 🌙 Operating on infinite lists Today we’re going to step through one of my favorite exercises in composing functions - building and operating on infinite streams of data.

Functions that go backwards Home 🌙 Functions that go backwards In most programming languages, we may author a function that takes an input and produces some output. console.log(getTrafficLightColor("green", "wait")) // => "yellow" We can say that our code…

Topological sort Home 🌙 Topological sort In computer science, a topological sort or topological ordering of a directed graph is a linear ordering of its vertices such that for every directed edge uv from vertex u to vertex v, u comes before v in the order…

98.css Home 🌙 98.css A few days ago I launched 98.css, a "design system" (it's a CSS file) for making interfaces that look like Windows 98 (on GitHub).

When code is data Home 🌙 When code is data You may find yourself itching to write a new programming language, or at least learn why someone might want to write a new programming language.

Is this true?