Partner | CTO | Lead Developer
2011 - 2017OKFocus- Wrote all the front-end and back-end JavaScript and managed all the aspects of our technology stack.
- Developed and implemented typically a one eye-catching, innovative interactive visual for each of our clients' websites.
- Designed and developed a custom back-end CMS written in Node.js; for use on single-serving websites for brands. The CMS would read a short schema file and use this to produce custom forms, writing all data to a JSON data store which could be mirrored via Git and produce webpages using Liquid templates.
- Designed and developed, for Vvalls, a 3D art gallery website in HTML5; including both a basic CAD program for drawing the floorplan of a room, and a 3D interface for adding art to walls so gallerists could mock up upcoming shows interactively.
- Designed and developed, for No Fish No Nothing, a 3D interactive website for Kenzo, showing off their SS-2014 collection; users scrolled through an interactive environment along a 3D path, learning both about the collection and the ecological dangers of overfishing.
- Developed, for Tug of Store, real-time product rating game for Svpply/eBay to show off their new API. Visitors would vote on whether a product was cool or not by clicking on either side of the screen.
- Developed, for 82nd and 5th, a splash page animation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website—designed to show off their curators' favorite artworks and historical artifacts.
- Designed and developed, for notthesa.me, an interactive music video for the band Tanlines using alpha-channel HTML5 video and a Photoshop-style interface. This work was profiled by Motherboard/VICE Magazine and was later tweeted by Adobe.
- Designed and developed an interactive music video for platinum-selling recording artist Bruno Mars, showing off the debut of Instagram Video (Treasure Dance). Participants would tag a video of themselves dancing, and then visit the website to see fan videos intercut on the fly with the official video.
- Designed and developed several websites for Red Bull Music Academy and Red Bull Studios, including an eye-catching 3D calendar for their 2014 RBMA NYC concert series. Developed software and visuals for an art exhibition at Red Bull Studios, titled "Alone Together," which visualized a collaborative web surfing performance.
- Developed several websites for underground fashion brand, including an eCommerce website (built on Shopify), an in-browser GIF photo booth, an iPhone app soundboard, and their main website featuring an advent calendar of their videos and images, curated via a custom back-end and accessible via an array of emojis.
- Developed a game called Draw With Your Face for Google Hangouts to show off new capabilities of their API including face detection and RTC.
- Built a custom map application called Science Near You for the Liberty Science Center, designed to help educators find science-related activities and events in New Jersey. Events were displayed on a map and could be filtered by distance to a location, event type, and age range using custom controls on an embedded Google Map.
- Developed one-off viral websites showing off an effect or a design joke (Where's The Pixel?, Emoji Zone, Arial Vs. Helvetica, Newmoticons, etc.). Some were later turned into iOS apps.
Technologies: Git, Adobe Photoshop, CSS, Node.js, JavaScript, HTML5CTO
2013 - 2016Vvalls- Designed and developed a 3D art gallery application for museum curators and gallerists, to mock up upcoming exhibitions and share visual ideas for shows.
- Built a graphics engine using 3D CSS transforms, chosen to take advantage of embeddable content from other websites. Also, a contemporary concern: the resulting rooms would be viewable on existing mobile technology, pre-WebGL.
- Developed basic CAD software for designing 3D room plans and decorating them interactively using a natural drag-and-drop interface. Users could walk through their room layout and put things on the walls: images, GIFs, but also embeddable media such as YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud content.
- Developed a geometry engine for transforming 2D polygon drawings into contiguous 3D volumes and constraining object positions on the resulting walls.
- Built a back-end for administrators to manage all data in the system directly via a CRUD API.
- Sketched, researched, and developed fun features on top of this 3D architecture framework such as animated wallpaper, colored walls, drawing on walls, wall text, auto-playing video and sound, and auto-populating a room with images from a Tumblr. I encouraged artist friends to use the platform for inventive purposes, creating unique visuals and contexts.
Technologies: Vimeo, YouTube, APIs, MongoDB, Node.jsDeveloper
2011 - 2012VFiles- Developed an archive of fashion magazines accessible through a web interface.
- Developed tagging interfaces where slices of images were tagged by fashion experts with such attributes as designer, brand, article of clothing, color, year, style, etc.
- Developed a search functionality for locating specific images based on these attributes, and displaying pieces of images, e.g. "all shoes designed by Karl Lagerfeld in the 1970s", "all Dolce and Gabbana advertisements from Japanese Vogue, sorted by color."
- Incorporated a history functionality where all edits by all users could be browsed.
- Developed various fun show-pieces for the brand, such as a 1-800 hotline (built on Twilio) where parties and other content could be announced. Content on the 1-800 number was editable via a custom back-end.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby, JavaScriptCurator | Programmer | Researcher | Community Manager
2005 - 2011NNDB- Helped build a biographical graph database including over 40,000 people and over a hundred thousand other entities by conducting original research as well as writing software to identify holes in the data, interconnections between entities, and areas for further research.
- Updated a daily blog/news aggregator, which highlighted weird news, international politics, cryptography, and taught general concepts of media literacy.
- Managed a community of 3,000 people based on the news aggregator, writing software to flag offensive content and perform general user management.
- Wrote content and copy-edited a wiki of the weird and strange.
- Designed and developed a website for daily celebrity news, including ad hoc HTML generation tools.
Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, PerlCTO | Lead Developer
2008 - 2010Food Genome- Developed software for analyzing text-based recipes and turning them into data for further analysis.
- Developed an interactive taxonomy-based wiki of food.
- Developed an API for searching and processing recipe data and other data related to food. Included a modular browser-based API dashboard.
- Conducted research and speculative design into new ways of thinking about food, transmuting recipes into different cuisines, making them vegan, and more.
- Created colorful data visualizations of recipes, using this information to learn information about our recipes, and later worked with a textile designer to produce tote bags and place settings.
Technologies: Perl, CSS, JavaScript, HTML5
Jules LaPlace
SVG Developer in Berlin, Germany
Member since March 3, 2017
From 2011 to 2016, Jules was the CTO of OKFocus, a boutique digital agency based in New York—where he led the development on interactive websites for large clients such as Google, Viacom, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nike, and Red Bull as well as several successful self-directed projects and viral websites. He enjoys sketching in code as a way to prototype new interactions and graphic ideas.
Jules is now available for hire
Experience
- JavaScript 10 years
- HTML5 8 years
- CSS3 7 years
- Node.js 6 years
- SVG 5 years
- React Native 1 year
Availability
Part-time
Preferred Environment
Vim Text Editor, Git, Linux, MacOS
The most amazing...
...project I've worked on is a 3D collaborative art gallery built with HTML5.
Employment
Skills
Languages
HTML, CSS, CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, Sass, SCSS, XML, Perl, Python, Ruby, Bash ScriptFrameworks
Vanilla JS, PhoneGap, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Chrome, Sinatra, React NativeLibraries/APIs
Node.js, YouTube API, Vimeo API, jQuery, ImageMagick, WebGL, Three.js, Socket.IO, JSONP, Instagram API, SoundCloud API, Backbone.js, Google Maps API, Liquid, Shopify API, Tumblr API, WebRTC, Snap.svg, Lodash, Mustache, Web Audio, Web Audio API, Facebook API, Twitter API, React, D3.js, Twilio APITools
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Browserify, Nginx, Apache, PM2, Webpack, Chrome Developer Tools, Git, Vim Text Editor, Xcode, GreenSock, Adobe InDesignParadigms
Responsive Web Design (RWD), Functional ProgrammingPlatforms
iOS, Shopify, Heroku, Android, Linux, MacOS, YouTube, AWS EC2Other
Web Scraping, Scraping, 3D, Responsive UI, Fine Arts, SVG, Animation, Demos, ASCII, Chrome Extensions, App Store Acceptance Process, Vi, SSH, Data Visualization, CORS, Google Maps Styling, Bots, APIs, Vimeo, Extensions, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, HAProxy, Verlet EnginesStorage
JSON, AWS S3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Education
- Bachelor's Degree in Comparative Literature, Russian Language & Literature, Italian Language2002 - 2005University of California at Berkeley - Berkeley, CA, USA
- Diploma in secondary school1997 - 2001Phillips Academy - Andover, MA, USA
