John Chang
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jrcpl.us
John Chang
@jrcpl.us
Immigrant (🇺🇸🇸🇪🇪🇺🇹🇼), Silicon Valley refugee (ex-Apple, Skype, Microsoft). #web0 #bicyclesforthemind.
Based in Stockholm, Sweden.
Achievement unlocked.

6 countries, 43 hours of train/bus
August 2, 2025 at 8:02 PM
"mail or fax this form to NeXT Technical Services"
July 19, 2025 at 2:48 PM
This is fantastic. @trts.bsky.social revived an app I wrote 20 years ago and got it running on modern macOS. Impressive work!! Code sometimes lives a lot longer than you'd think.
@jrcpl.us andrewshaw.nl/blog/revivin... a little write up of the journey you might like to read :-)
Andrew Shaw
andrewshaw.nl
July 16, 2025 at 8:46 PM
OMG
June 18, 2025 at 2:00 PM
"Only unpickle data you trust."
May 26, 2025 at 3:22 PM
I finished reading Careless People www.goodreads.com/book/show/22.... Oof.
Now I feel disgusted when I have to use any Meta service.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and…
An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the …
www.goodreads.com
May 22, 2025 at 5:29 PM
YT recommended this remake of the Civ 4 intro to me: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Cb.... It was fun to compare it to the original. But it becomes clear that humanity has no better idea of The Future than escaping Earth and living in outer space.
Civilization IV - Baba Yetu (Movies editon)
YouTube video by Mark Magnar
www.youtube.com
May 21, 2025 at 8:01 AM
As a kid, I learned to program in HyperCard, a fantastic thing from Apple in the 1990s which empowered normal people to make homemade software. Last fall @pontus.granstrom.me started exploring and reinterpreting these ideas for 2025. Excited to share our writeup: pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/
Scrappy
make little apps for you and your friends
pontus.granstrom.me
May 19, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Bret Victor: Instagram on every phone is like McDonald's on every street corner www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixP...
Computational Public Space
YouTube video by Dynamicland
www.youtube.com
May 16, 2025 at 6:37 AM
this was not obvious at all. posting for others.

"You need an adult to buy this. / We can't send a request for this one, so you'll have to ask another way"

Solution: go to account.microsoft.com/family/, the child's account > Spending, and temporarily turn off "Require approval for every purchase".
May 15, 2025 at 5:54 PM
www.reddit.com/r/programmin... the top comment suggests EC2 was invented after Amazon bought a ton of HW to deal with non-performant microservices (lol), though the timeframe mentioned is Q3 2006, which is already when EC2 is announced. Hmm
[Deleted Account]'s comment on "How AWS came to be"
Explore this conversation and more from the programming community
www.reddit.com
May 14, 2025 at 12:11 PM
@pontus.granstrom.me here's the thesis behind the (now defunct) Icelandic startup doing "graphical recipe" software: skemman.is/bitstream/19...
skemman.is
May 12, 2025 at 3:30 PM
I just want to enter a date in 2029, but it won't let me type; I have to click. And the click target keeps moving.
If & when you mess up, it resets to the current month.
(Also in this locale, the first weekday should be Monday.)

Why pay €€€ to build this, instead of using a native widget? Sigh.
March 21, 2025 at 8:47 AM
Someday
March 9, 2025 at 10:11 PM
I had a blast reading the Computer History Museum's interview of Bertrand Serlet, the "father of Mac OS X". I learned some things that surprised me: Bertrand thought Objective C was getting outdated and pushed to get rid of it,
…cont'd
www.computerhistory.org/collections/...
Serlet, Bertrand oral history | 102808913 - CHM
1401 N Shoreline Blvd
www.computerhistory.org
March 8, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Microsoft announced that Skype will be "retiring" in May. My immediate thought: "Retiring" sounds nice!

I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. Of course it's sad to see Skype go from becoming a verb (up there with Xerox, Kleenex, Band-Aid) to a has-been within a handful of years.

Thoughts: 🧵
March 2, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Ok, I got nerd sniped. I used to play Infocom games, and this has been a blast. Well-written, thoughtfully designed. Highly recommend.
I have finished "Type Help", a database-style thinky narrative game which I can't think of anything to say about it that isn't spoilery. It sucked me in hard for two straight evenings. Excellent stuff.

william-rous.itch.io/type-help
Type Help by William Rous
The Unsolvable Mystery
william-rous.itch.io
March 1, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Audience q: "We've had Smalltalk, Squeak for a really long time, and these are shown off as, "Look, it's a great prototype of"… what? What's the business model, what's the development model? You've got some buttons, you push them, they go beep. That's great. But … what is it you hope people build?"
February 1, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Next up: Neko
January 28, 2025 at 8:13 PM
People seemed to have stopped complaining about the EU bottle caps.
January 25, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Just went to a wonderful performance of Appalachian Spring and Rhapsody in Blue at Berwaldhallen. Hearing these two creative masterworks back to back—Copland's expansive themes and Gershwin's energetic, beautiful dissonance—made me proud to be an American again.

Need to hang onto that feeling.
January 23, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Take yourself back to 1981…
Q. What are personal computers for?
A. They are tools to do five things: Think, Organize, Communicate, Learn, and Play.

From Jean-Louis Gassée's book www.goodreads.com/book/show/16...
January 18, 2025 at 2:25 PM
It should feel like a creative tool for humans, not a development environment for programmers
January 17, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by John Chang
January 17, 2025 at 2:20 PM
✅ local-first 👏 with cloud sync
@localfirstconf.com
January 16, 2025 at 1:56 PM