Functional Technologies LLC
Based in San Francisco, CA
Founded in 2017
https://www.functional.fyi

Introducing shortcut, a command line utility published on NPM.

Shortcut makes it easy to remember commonly-used commands. You can add a shortcut with shortcut add $name $command. For example shortcut add hello echo Hello! shortcut hello.

Learn more at https://github.com/rchrd2/shortcut, or install it with npm install -g shortcut-cli.

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: 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

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

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/

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.

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

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

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/

Android was created as an open and flexible platform, giving people more ways to come together to imagine and create. Developers everywhere have used the unique capabilities of the platform to push the limits of what’s possible on phones, tablets, watches and beyond.

Android Experiments is a website by Google designed to showcase the creative possibilities of the Android platform.

This was my first project working together with both Use All Five and the Google Creative Lab. My role was to build the CMS and API that powered the frontend. At the Creative Lab's request, the backend was written in the Go programming language.

Site: https://www.androidexperiments.com
Agency: Use All Five
Launch Date: August 12, 2015
Technologies : Google App Engine, Go, Polymer

Google News Lab is a website designed to help journalists learn the best ways to use Google tools for reporting and storytelling.

I was brought onto this project, because of my knowledge of Python and Django. Django turned out to be a really great fit allow us to rapidly develop and evolve and content management system and API.

It was easy to add features such as converting the CMS and API to have translations in over a dozen languages.

The application runs on Google App Engine and utilizes Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL.

Site: https://newslab.withgoogle.com/
Agency: Use All Five
Launch Date: June 19, 2015
Technologies : Google App Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Memcache, Django

Announcing this timeline

This website is a hybrid blog and portfolio. As someone with a diverse set of interests, a timeline is the best way to catalog my output. The filters showcase my different hats, but when it comes to it, everything I do is bound by myself and the passage of time.

Also, check out the about page.

I have been using Django for over two years, and I have grown to love the rich feature set it comes with. Yes, there's a lot one ends up not using, but it is great that these things are there for when one needs it. It's worth noting that these extra features do not cause a performance impact. Django can be stripped down and is capable of returning < 10ms responses.

Django offers many interfaces with swappable backends. For example you can use the same ORM functions for interacting with Postgres or Mysql. Or you can send Email directly from the server or via a commercial service like SendGrid (3rd party). Or you can choose from a variety of cache backends: In-memory, Memcache, or Redis (3rd party).

And once one has experience with the Django framework, it is really quick to develop web applications. These are all reasons why it's compelling to invest further into Django.

I have put together a simple python package to make it easy to add caching to any function in a django project. It's called django-cache-decorator.

Installation

pip install django-cache-decorator  

Example Usages

from django_cache_decorator import django_cache_decorator

@django_cache_decorator(time=0)
def geocodeGoogleAddressJson(location):  
   """Cache indefinitely until cache is reset or expired"""
   ...


@django_cache_decorator(time=500, cache_key="TagManager:popularTags")
def popularTags(self):  
   """Cache for 500 seconds. Specify a custom cache key"""
    ...


@django_cache_decorator(time=0, cache_type='redis')
def reverse_geocode(lng, lat):  
   """Cache indefinitely with redis backend"""
   ...

How it works

When the @django_cache_decorator is applied to a function, it'll cache the results of that function. If no cache_key is passed, a cache key will be generated automatically from the function name and the arguments. See the function cache_get_key for details.

The decorator also supports the argument cache_type to specify which backend to use.

Links

• Django Cache Decorator on PyPI
• Django Cache Decorator on Github
• Original inspiration by James Lin
• Django Project

In April 2015, I worked on the websites for the critically acclaimed film, Ex Machina.

Ex Machina Official Website - I helped implement the desktop and mobile site.

Ava Sessions - I added the feature to Geocode the user locations with GeoIP and show contextual weather information. I implemented the backend API that received image uploads from the client and created various thumbnails and uploaded them to Amazon S3.

I also helped architect and implement the mobile website. Since the desktop site was built with React, it was possible to create a separate root component that reused but differently composed components from the desktop site.

Most credit, however, is due to Osk Studio for their design and coding.