Articles

Datasets - How Neural Machine Translation Works

I’m currently working on training client-side translation models for Firefox. These models are small distilled models that can be reasonably downloaded by our users, and run directly on their machines… read

Encoding Text in UTF-8 – How Unicode Works (Part 2)

In part 1 of this article I covered the idea of creating character sets, and different strategies for encoding them. The article covered UTF-32 and UTF-16 encodings with the benefits… read

Diacritical Marks in Unicode

I won’t bury the lede, by the end of this article you should be able to write your name in crazy diacritics like this: Ḡ͓̟̟r̬e̱̬͔͑g̰ͮ̃͛ ̇̅T̆a̐̑͢ṫ̀ǔ̓͟m̮̩̠̟. This article is part… read

Encoding Text, UTF-32 and UTF-16 – How Unicode Works (Part 1)

The standard for how to represent human writing for many years was ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This representation reserved 7 bits for encoding a character. This… read

Better Code Reviews with Mercurial History Rewriting

This is a companion piece to the Better Code Reviews with git History Rewriting, but this time with mercurial. The intro from that post works for this one as well… read

Better Code Reviews with git History Rewriting

The following post is a walkthrough on how I take a larger pull request, and break it down into well-ordered commits. At Mozilla, there is a pretty strong code review… read

Drawing ASCII Art to Test a Physics System

Generating my own ASCII art in programming projects is a great way to solve certain hard problems. Diagrams made from PNGs with some kind of rendered documentation is great, but… read

Documenting Regex with ASCII Art

Generating my own ASCII art in programming projects is a great way to solve certain hard problems. Diagrams made from PNGs with some kind of rendered documentation is great, but… read

WebGL Model View Projection

As part of a fellowship with MDN in 2016, I wrote content around the use of the model, view, and projection matrix for WebGL code. This article explores how to take… read

Matrix Math for the Web

As part of a fellowship with MDN in 2016, I wrote content around the use of matrix math, but with a web content spin. Matrices can be used to represent transformations… read

How to Draw Beautiful Things in the Browser

In 2014 I wrote a pretty detailed post on getting into creative coding. It featured live code examples, and I spoke briefly about some of my philosophy with approaching creativity… read

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