Projects

One of my professional goals is to launch at least one new project every year. I’m making small bets and staying comfortable with failure.

2024

test_visualizer: A Ruby gem that helps visualize your test architecture.

“Technical Book About Testing”: I wrote a 30K-word draft of a technical book about automated testing. It’s on pause while I do other things.

2023

Maine JS: I took over as organizer of this Meetup in 2023. Along with my co-organizers I’ve rebranded, reinvigorated, and grown group membership 3x through a series of monthly events.

Yes, It’s a Problem: Chat-GPT-powered hobby application that confirms all your fears. Ask it about the risks of waterskiing and it gives you an article titled “Hidden Dangers of Waterskiing: The Truth About the Risks and Injuries for Beginners”, an article-length body, and an accompanying image via DALL-E.

2022

Defragmenter: My newsletter. Every week, I spend an hour crafting ideas that feel like the kind of conversation I’d have had with a sharp, seasoned colleague ten years ago.

2021

React Explained: I launched this React-focused newsletter during the pandemic, publishing thirty issues about the latest news and advancements in the community. The publishing platform I chose, Revue, has since shut down and issues are no longer available on the internet.

2020

FinTech Startup: For a year I moonlighted as CTO and co-founder of a FinTech startup. We built an MVP web application in React and TypeScript and an API in Ruby on Rails. We built something I am proud of and I learned a lot.

The Bell: The Bell was a pandemic-inspired social-distancing art project I created and maintained from March–October 2020. Over the life of the project, The Bell was clicked over 4K times.

2018

Game of Life: This is my React/TypeScript implementation of the classic cellular automaton and programming puzzle, Conway’s Game of Life.

SQL Workshop: Jack Christensen and I built this full-day, hands-on SQL curriculum for the Code Platoon programming bootcamp. We continue to teach it live a few times a year.

JavaScript Equality: I built this React/TypeScript application to demonstrate the difference between twoquals and threequals in JavaScript.

2016

PG Casts: PG Casts is a series of screencasts about PostgreSQL. My coworkers and I built it together during downtime at Hashrocket. I helped create the idea, build the site, and wrote, recorded, and edited six screencasts as one of the founders.

2015

Today I Learned: TIL was my apprentice project at Hashrocket. It has grown into a popular developers blog with 2.6K posts, millions of page views per year, and the top-ranked answers on Google to many an esoteric question. It’s also open-source, one of the first such Phoenix repositories. Visit

Ceramic Nation: Ceramic Nation was an auto-generated internet novel, one chapter per day, supported by a Ruby gem I wrote called Remarkovable. From 2015-2022 it produced nonsensical, occasionally inspired prose informed by a corpus of classic literature.

TIL (Today I Learned): ‘Technical articles; needless words omitted.’ I’ve posted short technology learnings here since 2015.

2014

jakeworth.com: The technical blog you’re reading now. Learn, write, repeat.