Hi, I'm Richard Caceres, a Developer, Designer, and Musician. 

As of 2023, I am an independent consultant and jazz musician.

In 2019 I became an engineer on the design team at Quip.com, and moved into Slack after Salesforce acquired Slack. Before, I was a software engineer at the Internet Archive on the books team building the tools to digitize and read millions of books online. And previously I helped build Cargo Collective and worked on many great websites with OSK Studio and Use All Five. I also co-created wowlist.org. And last but not least, there are also a handful of open source projects and libraries under my name on Github.

I'm born, raised, and currently live in the San Francisco, Bay Area. My parents are from Guatemala and Nicaragua.

This website is a hybrid blog and portfolio. Scroll down to see what I have been up to.

Under Construction

Wayback Time Machine

The Wayback Time Machine provides a way to visually explore the evolution of a website. It is inspired by Apple's 3d visual language in iOS and Mac OS.

It is powered by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. See the Wayback Machine CDX API.

Created with Jono Brandel at the 2017 Internet Archive Experiments Hackathon. See source code on Github.

A microservice built with NodeJS and Chromium headless generates the screenshots from the Wayback Machine. They are rendered in a 3d axis with ThreeJS.

Site: http://wayback-timemachine.pages.archivelab.org?q=nytimes.com
Technologies: Html, React, Chromium Headless, WebGL / Three.JS

Gifcities.org

"GifCities: The GeoCities Animated Gif Search Engine was a special project of the Internet Archive done as part of our 20th Anniversary to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the web archive and the Wayback Machine."

GifCities began as a side project by my colleagues Jefferson and Vinay. They had extracted all the animated GIFS from GeoCities from the Wayback Machine. I saw an opportunity to develop a user interface for this search index and developed it over the weekend. It later became an official project of the Internet Archive, and we spent more time refining it and releasing it to the public.

Site: https://gifcities.org
Technologies: Html, React

Press:
- https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/27/gifcities-is-a-search-engine-for-vintage-gifs-from-the-90s/
- https://blog.archive.org/2016/11/01/gifcities-the-geocities-animated-gif-search-engine/
- https://www.producthunt.com/posts/gifcities
- https://boingboing.net/2016/10/27/gifcities-a-search-engine-for.html
- https://lifehacker.com/find-animated-gifs-from-the-early-web-with-gifcities-1788333461

Archive Experiments

Inspired by Google's Chrome Experiments, Archive Experiments is a showcase of community made experiments built with data and services from Archive.org.

I thought of, designed, developed, and maintain this showcase. It started as an idea and side project, and now has been endorsed by the Internet Archive. In September 2017, an Archive Experments Hackathon was held at the Internet Archive.

Site: https://experiments.archivelab.org
Technologies: Html

Decentralized Web Summit

I had the privilege to help organize the Decentralized Web Summit at the Internet Archive. This summit featured keynote speeches from Brewster Khale, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, and Cory Doctorow. It was held at the Internet Archive June 8th - June 9th. People from all over the world came together to discuss how to rebuild the web.

I created the website. It is a static website (no backend), and it is also available through the decentralized filesystem, IPFS.

Site: http://www.decentralizedweb.net
Technologies: Html, Wintersmith, Neocities

Press:
- New York Times – "The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html?_r=0
- Wired – "The Inventors of the Internet Are Trying to Build a Truly Permanent Web"
http://www.wired.com/2016/06/inventors-internet-trying-build-truly-permanent-web/
- See also http://www.decentralizedweb.net/press/

Announcing x-gui

In March 2016 I presented at the Sandstorm SF Meetup. I shared the design process that went into creating TextEditor, and I extrapolated a set of design guidelines for creating open source apps. As a followup to this, I am anouncing x-gui, a library of web components for building consistent web apps.

X-gui is an experiment and is evolving rapidly as I prototype more apps to learn what components are needed. It could be compared to Google's Polymer Catalog, but key differences being it is built without a library like Polymer, and it has a completely different visual style (doesn't look like Google).

You can read more about the project on the x-gui github. The readme has a lot more info. There's also an online demo.

Want to start using it?

bower install x-gui/x-gui
# or
git clone git@github.com:x-gui/x-gui.git

Below are the slides from the talk.

The Revenant

Academy Award winning film, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

200miles.com uses cutting edge webgl technologies to create an immersive storytelling experience. Because of this, a simpler mobile version of the site was required. Under the direction of OSK Studio, I developed the mobile version of this website, which recreated some of the interactivity, while staying within the capabilities of what is possible on mobile.

Site: http://200miles.com
Agency: OSK Studio
Launch: December 2015
Technologies: Javascript, React, CSS

Processing Foundation

The founders of Folder Studio also went to UCLA albeit a bit later than myself. We still found a way to connect and worked together on the Processing Foundation website. Having studied with Casey Reas and used Processing in the past, it was a joy to work on this project.

For this website, I modeled the data and implemented a custom content management system that manages the data behind the site.

Site: https://foundation.processing.org
Agency: http://folderstudio.com
Launch Date: November 2015
Technologies: PHP, Kirby CMS

Google Frightgeist

Every day, over 3 billion searches take place on Google, and Google Trends gives us an unparalleled look at what the world is searching for. Google News Lab puts that data to use — from powering insightful journalism to helping you pick out your Halloween costume.

Frightgeist is a whimsical Halloween microsite. I worked with Use All Five and the Google Creative Lab. My role was to take raw data from the Google Trends team and process it to produce an JSON api for the frontend. During the week leading up to Halloween, the site was featured on the homepage of Google. The site won the 2016 Webby Award for "Best Visual Design - Function".

Site: https://frightgeist.withgoogle.com
Agency: Use All Five
Launch Date: Oct 20, 2015
Technologies: Google App Engine, Python, JSON
Webby Award Info: http://webbyawards.com/winners/2016/websites/website-features-and-design/best-visual-design-function/google-frightgeist/