Invisible Parade

Invisible Parade

Alex Onsager

My name is Alex. I grew up near Boulder, CO and spent most of my childhood reading books, playing music, and playing video games. I learned programming by making bad games for my TI-83 calculator. The first things I published online were bad flash websites. In college I studied programming and human-computer interaction. A team of classmates and I made a few apps on Facebook, which eventually turned into a startup. This was the first time I made something that was used by a large number of people. It became my introduction to making real products that have users and make money. I have been working at a mobile game company in Japan since 2010. Because my day-job doesn't currently involve much programming, I like to work on fun projects on the side that let me build things directly. Part of the reason I maintain this blog is the hope that it will help me make more connections online. Please feel free to get in touch! It would make me very happy.

Latest Posts

This post by Daniel Gilbert immediately resonated with me, because I struggle with procrastination and have found AI tools to be surprisingly helpful in overcoming it. I have a stale task waiting to be done, but I just can’t bring myself...
Local AI shines when the model’s job is transforming user-owned data, not acting as a search engine for the universe.
Spectrimage takes a photograph, visualizes the color information pixel-by-pixel, and builds a palette. Great writeup of techniques to extract a good set of colors from any image.
A lovely web app to extract color palettes from images. Simple, but really impressive set of features.
Consumption versus Creation. I’ve long been conscious of two contrasting categories of pastimes – those that consume, and those that create. Consumption is fast. Consumption is passive. Consumption is easy. Consumption in today’s world...
Modern CSS code snippets, side by side with the old hacks they replace. Every technique you still Google has a clean, native replacement now. There are really useful new CSS features that I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing about.
This looks like a pretty neat interactive fiction game, by Michael Gentry. Excited to give it a shot. This is a pretty enormous game. There are lots of rooms to explore and lots things to mess with, and they don’t all necessarily...
I recently rebuilt my site, and this gave me an opportunity to rethink how to organize its contents. Vertical architecture Most websites have what I consider to be a “vertical” architecture. This is probably based on early websites being...
This is a list of things I want to prioritize when choosing and customizing whatever static-site generator I use for building this site. Currently using: Jekyll, but not enthusiastically Next contender: Hugo 1. Just let me write my words...
A list of things I want to prioritize when choosing and customizing whatever static-site generator I use for building this site. Currently using: Jekyll, but not enthusiastically Next contender: Hugo 1. Just let me write my words I’ve...
When I’m having fun with a hobby, nothing kills my motivation faster than learning about a better, more efficient way I could be doing things. I was playing Fantasy Life i – chopping trees, making boots, fishing fish, and just generally...
When I’m having fun with a hobby, nothing kills my motivation faster than learning about a better, more efficient way I could be doing things. I was playing Fantasy Life i – chopping trees, making boots, fishing fish, and just generally...
Provector is a really useful web app for making simple SVG graphics. I find it really handy for throwing together simple logo ideas.
From Martin A. Schwartz: Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble...
A picture of my desk with a new desk mat from amesoba. I look at reviews before buying things, and I prefer personal websites and youtube channels over large publications because I can get a feel for the person behind the opinions, and...
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