Hey. I love to learn, experiment, create, and share.
My digital authorship is penned "featherless". This repo is an attempt to capture reflections on the works I've taken part in.
Welcome to my digital creative history. It will always be a work in progress.
What follows is a reverse-chronological timeline. As you scroll down you move further into my past. Creations are bucketed by month and I provide my annual birth date for a reference point.
I work at Google.
I lead the Material iOS engineering team, working closely with designers and engineers to help Google's 100+ apps align on common brand patterns in their app UI.
My team is responsible for maintaining and supporting every navigation bar, tab bar, dialog, activity indicator, progress bar, button, font, color, and icon you interact with in Google apps.
I also provide support for large-scale dependency and use analysis within the company through the analysis of Kythe references and bazel dependencies.
Published the Windfish disassembler, a tool for disassembling Gameboy ROMs.
↑ turned 33 :: 2020 ↑
Promoted to Staff Software Engineer (L6) at Google.
↑ turned 32 :: 2019 ↑
Started working on a tracing disassembler for Gameboy ROMs. Eventually published this as the Windfish disassembler in December 2020.
Created the BinaryCodable module for Swift.
↑ turned 31 :: 2018 ↑
My daughter, Eva, was born.
Released my fourth track, Denizens of the Astro Light.
↑ turned 30 :: 2017 ↑
Released my third track, New Moon Horizon.
Released my second track, Summer Skylands.
Also launched a website aimed at promoting my electronic music productions: featherless.live.
Released my first track, Lunar City.
Started learning how to compose music. Enrolled in a few online Ableton classes and started making simple loops.
Writing accompanying my 2016 day 271 mix:
Two waves collide and build a rebellious harmony.
Accustomed to discord, to chaotic dissonance,
to peaks met with valleys and valleys, peaks,
this beautiful amplification, this synchronous resonance
is but a forgotten friend. Remember.
Writing accompanying my 2016 day 270 mix:
"Happiness can be felt like floating in the wake of a passing ship, the intensity rising with the wave's edge and settling once more with new, ever-softening oscillations that persist long after the vessel has passed. Happiness in this light is unavoidable and altering. How we receive happiness depends entirely on us. Do we allow ourselves to be lifted? Do we hide beneath the surface? Are we anchored to the ocean floor and pulled beneath the water as the wave passes over us? Or are we buoyant, absorbing the energy and seeing past the horizon because of the ephemeral elevation?
The term buoyant has two meanings: "able to stay afloat" along with "cheerful and optimistic". I think that we become most open to the energy brought by happiness when we allow ourselves to be buoyant.
I believe that buoyancy is an innate human trait. As childhood optimism evolves into caution and eventually skepticism, we often begin to feel that this innate trait is a skill that must be practiced. The problem with this mentality is that it places buoyancy in the same prioritization queue as other skills, such as a job or maintaining social status. What if, instead of treating buoyancy as a skill, we evaluated the existing priorities in our life and whether or not they are enabling us to float? How might we best structure our lives to be lifted by happiness when it washes over us? Are our actions and routines anchoring us down, or are they enabling us to be buoyant?"
Writing accompanying my 2016 day 257 mix:
"The dust gets in everything. Your clothes. Your heart. Your mind. Decompression this year felt fine until I had a moment to myself, to settle in and reflect on a truly immersive burn. Suddenly the dust came pouring out.
In this day, where most of our Familial connections are sustained across borders through digital wires, the value of having, even for a brief period of time, so much Family within biking distance is immeasurable. As our Families scatter to the winds across the land and sea again, I'm immensely grateful for each moment of ephemeral playa serendipity and for that brief feeling of being truly at Home."
Solo-camped on the playa. Building nothing was wonderfully cathartic.
↑ turned 29 :: 2016 ↑
Began development of Material Motion in the open. Weekly updates.
Had a blast making one hour of a 24 hour mix collection of music with a friend.
Our mix, under the name m i t t e n s n m o c h i
I started learning how to mix electronic music using a Traktor Kontrol S2. I made a goal for myself to do two things as often as I could:
- Listen to 100 new tracks from Soundcloud.
- Make a mix.
I listen to a lot of electronic music so I also spin a lot of different kinds of sets. I don't plan to focus on any one genre over another until I feel that my technical skills have developed. My primary goal is to keep having fun while doing this.
Listen to all sets I've made thus far on Soundcloud.
Camped with Robot Heart at Burning Man for the second time. Rigged the lights for Shady Bot, the Heart, and helped with Brandeaux.
↑ turned 28 :: 2015 ↑
Returned to work at Google on the Material design team to complete the work I started just before leaving in 2013.
Lit Brandeaux for Robot Heart's annual halloween fundraiser.
Camped with Robot Heart at Burning Man for the first time. Helped light up the Shady Bot art car. Also left mid-way through burn week to fly directly to a friend's wedding in Toronto!
↑ turned 27 :: 2014 ↑
Please note, what follows is an emotionally sensitive post. Please leave now if you'd rather not read it.
Hey Mom, how're you feeling?
Pretty crummy!
Drink lots of soup! And make sure to get some sleep. Do you think you'll be able to help me with my taxes this year?
Of course.
Awesome, thanks Mom! Gotta go, gonna work on some projects. Love you bye!
Love you bye!
click
Year: 2010
Age: 22
First week, final term - Computer Sci. undergrad
It’s a Thursday morning and I'm hungover.
My phone is making this abundantly clear as it's rattling along the wooden floor. The alarm. Damn it. I don't want to wake up right now. Blurred numbers fade into focus on the clock beside me: early.
It’s the first week of my last term in school. In four months I'm starting my first full-time software engineering position. Things are looking great. My weekly schedule involves sleeping in every day and having a three day weekend, giving me plenty of time for side projects. I think today I'll work on the website for the uwdata api...wait, why the hell is my alarm on?
The phone's on its face. I flip it over and reflexively start disabling the alarm.
It’s not my alarm.
My cell phone’s ringing.
Home, it glows.
My mom and 17 year old sister both live in Alberta, two time zones behind me at the time. Early rising was not our thing. This call...this call is peculiar.
Ah well - a quick drag of my finger across the screen and I lay the phone on the side of my head. I'm still in bed.
“Waddaaap”
“She's not”
It's my sister. I can't make out what she says because she starts sobbing.
"Jess, what's going on?"
"She's not, she's not....she's not BREATHING"
Jesus, what is she talking about?
“What do you mean Jess?”
"It's mooooom, she's not breathing!!!"
"What? What happened?"
I’m sitting up.
"She's not breathing!!"
"Jess slow down everything's going to be ok did you call 911?"
"Yeeeeeesss the paramedics are here right now but she's not breeeeeathing!"
"Ok tell me what happened.”
This can’t be real. My entire attention is focused on my sister's voice.
Please. Please don't let this be as bad as it's sounding.
"I came upstairs sob to go to school and sob Mom hadn’t come downstairs sob to wake me up which was weird sob so I was about to leave for school sob but I went to check on her in her room sob and she was laying on the side of the bed sob weirdly with her legs off the side”
She's hyper-ventilating.
"Jess slow down. Take a deep breath. Keep telling me what happened.”
“…I said to her 'Moom why are you laying down like that?' because she was half on the bed and it was really weird but when I went over to her she was blue and cold oh my gooood I tried to do CPR but she was so heavy when I tried to pull her off the bed and she won’t wake uuuuup“
fuck. fuck fuck fuck
"Ok you did as much as you could Jess. You called 911 and the paramedics are helping her right?”
"Yeeeeah they're in the bedroom right now why isn't she breeaaathing?"
"Jess it's ok I'm sure the paramedics will be able to hel..."
I hear a voice in the background and my sister drops the phone.
I will never, ever forget that scream for the rest of my life.
I'm staring at my bedsheets. Or maybe nothing. Everything is blank.
A new voice is speaking on the phone. It's Jess's boyfriend.
"One of the paramedics just came out of the room. I’m sorry. Your mother's passed away."
nothingness
The next twelve hours blur. I call my granddad, my dad, and my girlfriend at her work. We arrived in Edmonton that evening and met my sister at her boyfriend's house.
It still hadn't hit me.
It didn't hit me Friday when we went to see the body, or on Mother's Day the following day, or even after we gave the first funeral service on Tuesday. I somehow managed to sing the Irish Blessing with my grandfather.
I was back home in Waterloo, sitting at the kitchen table by myself. A full week later. Thursday, 3am.
I cried. I cried, and cried, and cried. I cried at the un-realness of it, at the cruelty of it, at the thought that my sister and I had just had the one person who mattered most to us taken away without so much as a hug, a kiss, or even a simple goodbye. Who would help my sister at her wedding? Who would be there for our graduations, crying with pride? Who would we play pranks on at Christmas every year?
The closeness of the idea that one can be of visibly fine health one evening and the next morning not make it out of bed shook me to the core. How does one move forward when the prospect of death becomes so permanently real? What if you might not be able to say "bye" to the ones you love?
Maybe the last thing you’ll talk to them about will be taxes.
My mother died because of a pulmonary embolism on May 6, 2010.
Life after death modified my behavior in subtle, powerful ways.
The concept that anyone close to me could disappear forever became the forefront of my thinking. I could disappear forever.
My initial reaction was to throw myself into my work, to hide behind the short-term feedback loop of skill and hard work. To create and build as much as I could as fast as I could because every piece of my being could be extinguished in a heartbeat, or lack thereof.
This burnt me out.
I learned a valuable lesson as a result of giving myself entirely: happiness must be shared, not given. You can give and give and give only to be left empty, with no happiness left for yourself. But when you find people to share with, then happiness has a way of returning to you, of fulfilling you, of nurturing your soul and causing you to overflow with joy.
It was at this point that I began to understand the value of creating open source software. It is why everything that I create is open sourced and the code that I write for companies is written in such a way that it has utility long after I've left. It's why I adopted the idea of "documentation is greater than source".
By ensuring that anything I create can be shared and grown even in my absence, I choose to turn the fear of my own death into a creative outlet, a purpose, and a belief in the value of positivity.
This is also the point when I adopted "work hard to not work hard". Rather than doing the same "work" for 80 hours a week, I began spending twenty or thirty hours, often returning home while the sun was still up. This form of meta-work on myself made me happier, more energetic, and in the end I was still at least as productive as my co-workers. The added-bonus: more time to explore other aspects of life. These explorations fed positively back into my work, making me more productive and needing to spend less time at work.
My mother's death shocked me straight to the core and it wasn't my choice. But I believe that the choices I've made since her death have lead me to a fuller life, a life in which each moment is a precious opportunity to connect to, to share with, and to be challenged by others.
I know that I know very little, but this I know right now: give the best of yourself, whether to friend or acquaintance, because you might not get to clean things up later.
♥
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
and the rains fall soft upon your fields.
Until we meet again, my friend,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
- Traditional Irish Blessing -
Organized camp Pixel Heart + Buddha Lounge on the Burning Man esplanade at the 7:30 portal.
See pictures, schematics, and learn more about the Pixel Heart camp
↑ turned 26 :: Went backpacking :: 2013 ↑
Brought the Pixel Heart to Lightning in a Bottle.
See pictures and learn more about our Lightning in a Bottle experience
I left the Google Maps iOS team after shipping v1.1 in order to travel.
I practiced my first official "step-down" process by going out of my way to hand off responsibility to other members of the team. mog, for example, took ownership of much of the day-to-day nimbus maintenance.
Shipped Google Maps iOS after just six months of development.
Invested significant effort in polishing the app's user experience.
I also built the foundation for what became Google's Material design iOS efforts during this time.
The app received high praise by the press:
- Mobile App of the Year. Crunchies 2012.
- Best User Experience. Webby Awards 2012.
- Best Use of GPS. Webby Awards 2012.
Built the "bottom drawer" gesture-driven interface as part of Google Maps iOS.
I took great care to polish the behavior of the bottom drawer. Notable behavior includes:
- the ability to dismiss the full-screen content by dragging down past the top,
- the ability to toss the drawer into a full-screen mode in a natural manner,
- support for mid-expansion and full-expansion.
↑ turned 25 :: Launched Google Maps iOS :: 2012 ↑
Moved to a new team at Google.
I moved to the Google+ games iOS team where I built and documented a significant amount of the API.
Started my first full-time salaried job at Google.
I joined the Google+ team. I initially worked on the Google+ iPad app.
↑ turned 24 :: joined Google full time :: 2011 ↑
Started working on the Nimbus iOS libraries.
I stopped working on the Facebook iPad app.
Graduated from university.
↑ turned 23 :: graduated university :: 2010 ↑
I took on the Facebook iPad app project as the sole engineer. I worked closely with Brandon Walkin through this time.
My mother passed away unexpectedly. I started a habit of writing notes of appreciation to people. Sometimes I give the note to the person. Sometimes I stick the note in a book I keep in a safe place. I also started making regular digital backups of my life including tax filings, employment information, landlord and rental information, and passwords to various accounts.
Second internship at Facebook.
I worked with Owen Yamauchi and Joe Hewitt on the Facebook iOS app. I took ownership of the Three20 project after the internship.
I shut down the Strips web comic reader due to a strong community backlash resulting from the way in which I handled the comic artist relationships:
A formal apology - Oct 26, 2009
I want to formally apologize to each of the artists that were listed on Strips without explicit consent. The rationale behind doing this was shortsighted and boneheaded. I want to explain my rationale to anyone interested in hearing it. As a fan of a number of web comics I spent a lot of time reading them on the iPhone, struggling with Safari to read each strip. This summer, I decided to try my hand at making an iPhone application that would make it easier to read comics on the iPhone. I started by building an application and, over the proceeding weeks, sent out emails to approximately 20 artists asking them if they would like to be a part of the app. Included in the emails were details about how artists would receive ad revenue and how they could contact me with respect to being included. For each publisher I also made an information page, showing exactly how the process worked. Here's PvP's and 8-Bit Theater's. I hoped that this would be above-and-beyond the existing iPhone apps that display comics without any ads or even a hint at working with the artists. In theory I believed this was an honorable approach, but I became too eager with the product and released it before receiving explicit consent from a number of artists, hoping that I could provide each artist with useful analytics in the meantime. As the weeks went on, I finished the app and submitted it to the app store. At that point, I had only received word from a couple web comics including Dinosaur Comics and Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Both asked to not be a part of the app, and so I immediately made sure that they weren't listed. The problem with this approach is that it's opt-out, when it should have been opt-in from the start. A result of this is the recent understandable backlash from a number of artists concerning their content being available on Strips. I want to iterate as much as possible that I am more than willing to work with artists to help them publish their content on the iPhone, but that I have gone about it absolutely the wrong way thus far. I'm trying my best to work with each of the artists, but it's hard to find the contact information for some comics. If you are an artist and you want to discuss this whole issue, I am more than willing to email you, but it would help if you provide me with your email address first. You can contact me through publishers@stripsapp.com. At the end of the day, I created this out of passion for software development and web comics. It's a glorified RSS reader for the iPhone with a hopeful tie-in for artists to receive an extra source of revenue. I'm sincerely apologetic to the comics I haven't properly contacted and as someone who sincerely did this with the hopes of helping out comics in the end, I feel that I have failed in my goal. Sincerely,
- Jeff
Built the Strips web comic reader and platform for the iPhone.
↑ turned 22 :: entered fifth year of university :: 2009 ↑
First internship at Facebook.
I worked on chat.
↑ turned 21 :: entered fourth year of university :: 2008 ↑
Internship at Google.
I worked on the Google Calendar team. I made it so that event chips are the color of the calendar you're about to create them on (they used to just always be grey).
Third internship at Sony Creative Software.
↑ turned 20 :: entered third year of university :: 2007 ↑
Second internship at Sony Creative Software.
↑ turned 19 :: entered second year of university :: 2006 ↑
First internship at Sony Creative Software.
Won 1st place for Hunger Strike! in the 72 hour game development competition.
Get the source to the game and see some paper scribbles.
↑ turned 18 :: entered university :: 2005 ↑
Redesigned TheJeffFiles.com.
↑ turned 17 :: entered grade 12 :: 2004 ↑
Created a LWO file format renderer.
Rebuilt the Blood Right 3D engine again, this time with support for loading real models, moving entities, and particle systems.
Launched TheJeffFiles.com, my personal website:
↑ turned 16 :: entered grade 11 :: 2003 ↑
Made a garage sale application.
Attended the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology. This was the first time I visited the Bay Area.
Prior to the event I collaborated with a group of other attendees to create "The Developers Alliance". As part of this group we built a game — Escape from the Funky Factory — and presented it at the conference.
Created Escape from the Funky Factory in collaboration with The Developers Alliance.
Created the Script-and-Go scripting language for OpenGL.
/* Script-and-Go code by Jeff Verkoeyen,
created 2003 */
VARIABLES;
@int integer;
@float integer2;
@char testing;
testing="hey";
integer2=34;
BEGIN;
integer+234;
DrawMode("front","lines");
Reset; // Equivalent to LoadIdentity
DisableTextures; // Disables the textures
Move(0,0,-100); // Moves the line back on the z-plane
SetColor(1.0f,0.5f,0.25f,0.0f); // Sets the color to orange
DrawLine(0,0,0,38,20,0); // Draws the line
DrawLine(30,20,0,-10,-30,40); // Draws another line, but closer
Reset;
Move(0,0,-100);
SetColor(1.0f,1.0f,0.0f,0.5f);
Rotate(integer,1.0f,0.0f,0.0f);
Move(10,20,0);
Box(-10,10,0,10,10,0,10,-10,0,-10,-10,0);
END;
Lost a significant amount of data due to a wiped hard drive.
One note on the bad-side my computer's harddrive was wiped, therefor clearing every single one of the calculator programs that I've ever created, so I lost most of the new Raging Flame engine and such, but most of the stuff is recreatable, I just haven't really had the will to do so recently, and I'm also developing video games for the computer now, so I guess I've moved on, heh.
Working on the 3d version of the Blood Right game.
Created a new game called JetPack Jack.
Began my biggest project yet: Blood Right for the computer.
Wrote a beginner's C++ tutorial
Created my first OpenGL C++ game: Asteridiaz.
↑ turned 15 :: entered grade 10 :: 2002 ↑
Composed simple songs in FruityLoops.
Began learning C++ by making simple DOS games.
Arcade:
Roidian:
Galaxiados:
Began work on v3 of the Raging Flame TI83+ game.
Wrote a TI83+ programming tutorial.
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| _ | || || | |_| |_| | | | || ||
| | | | | \_/ | | | | | | \_/ |
|_| |_| \___/ \_______/ |_| \___/
Program on the TI83+
\~--------------------~/
Table of Contents
\~------------------~/
\ /
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\ /
\ /
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\/
Section 1..............Introduction
Section 2..............Getting Started (With programming)
Section 3..............The next level....
Section 4..............Time to CLEAR some things up!
Section 5..............While loops are just the same
Section 6..............Input and Output, not as confusing as they seem
Read the rest in all its ASCII glory.
Created the TI Project Development Area website. Began hosting all of my TI83+ games and software on the site as well as writing tutorials.
Released Raging Flame 2: Legend of Krynn. Learn more.
Released Epic: an interactive story. Learn more.
↑ turned 14 :: entered grade 9 :: 2001 ↑
Taught myself how to write TI83+ graphing calculator apps using TIBasic.
View videos and screenshots of the games
↑ turned 13 :: entered grade 8 :: 2000 ↑
Not until a friend of mine showed me that he could edit the source to a website did I realize that it was within my reach to write my own computer programs.
↑ turned 12 :: entered grade 7 :: 1999 ↑
↑ turned 11 :: entered grade 6 :: 1998 ↑
↑ turned 10 :: entered grade 5 :: 1997 ↑
↑ turned 9 :: entered grade 4 :: 1996 ↑
↑ turned 8 :: entered grade 3 :: 1995 ↑
During my second and third grade years I made "paper platformer" games. I would take a piece of paper, fold it down the middle vertical and then make four equally-spaced horizontal cuts. This allowed me to make a "book" with a front and back cover and 7 internal "full-width" pages.
Each full-width page was a hand-drawn level that looked like a cut-out side view of a building. There were monsters that you'd have to blow up with bazookas, trampolines to jump over chasms with, and ladders to move between levels.
Thinking back on it now, I may have been attempting to recreate Bugs Bunny for the Game Boy. I wasn't allowed to bring my Game Boy to school, so I'd draw these paper games and play them on the bus instead.
↑ turned 7 :: entered grade 2 :: 1994 ↑
↑ turned 6 :: entered grade 1 :: 1993 ↑
↑ turned 5 :: 1992 ↑
↑ Born in 1987 ↑