Boston Seaport Skyline

Alistair G MacDonald

Welcome to my blog! I am a web designer & developer living in Boston. I use HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3 & WordPress to create websites for desktop & mobile.

Blog

Recent Articles

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Magic Carpet – JS1k Entry

< 1Kb And cool   JavaScript Competition One of my friends Fernie from work showed me the JS1K Competition on Monday morning. I had heard about JS1K about a year...

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The Price of Convenience

Con-venience Making bad things easy Electronic Commerce One of the pitfalls of modern life is the convenience of the financial transaction. Computers make so many things in life literally as...

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Development In Mind

Thought Computers still suck   The Entropy of Information While computers are incredibly powerful tools, there is one thing they have not come close to achieving. Thought. A computer has...

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Favicon Meet Browser Icon

Clutter Too many open browsers   Concurrent Being a Web Developer can often mean running many concurrent browsers. It is important to quickly switch between browsers, to see the CSS...

Resume

Career Highlights

London to Boston

I have been developing websites professionally for over nine years. I started out my career working at some of London's top web-design agencies as a freelance web developer.I became a permanent resident in 2008, where I began to experiment with WebGL and Web Audio, while contracting for Mozilla.

Processing.js Technical Lead

I helped John Resig (creator of jQuery), with Processing.js and built the Processing.js web site. Mozilla asked me to become Technical Lead for The Processing For The Open Web project, working closely with students at Seneca, Centre for Development of Open Source Technology, University of York, Canada.

Boston JavaScript Meetup Group

For the last couple of years I have organized the Boston JavaSript Meetup group.

W3C Audio Working Group Chair

I chaired the W3C Audio Working Group for two years (currently invited expert). I organised meetings, created audio demos, updated specs traveled around speaking about the Web Audio at various conferences and Meet-up groups.

Co-Founded Bocoup

In 2009 I co-founded Bocoup in Fort Point. I helped grow our team from 2-12 awesome JavaScript developers. We started a very successful coworking facility next door from which many new companies have blossomed, one of which went on to win the MassChallenge in 2010.

CTO at SignedOn

I have spent the last year working as CTO at SignedOn in downtown Boston, where we created a lot of the foundation work for a PaaS/BaaS architecture in Node.js and developed WordPress and jQuery UI widgets for various clients.

Speaking

Conferences & Workshops

  • Web Technology for Small Businesses
    2013-03-16 - Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Boston
  • Standardization of Web Audio APIs
    2011-10-15 - Wakanday, Boston MA
  • Blender to WebGL
    2011-08-17 – HTML5 Game Development Meetup, Boston
  • WebGL Demo Workshop
    2011-06-17 – [AT]Party Demoscene Event, Harvard
  • Web Audio APIs
    2011-01-20 - HTML5 Game Development Meetup, Boston
  • Processing.js Interactive Workshop
    2010-11-08 - EDUI Conference, Virginia
  • Intro to Processing.js
    2010-11-08 - EDUI Conference, Virginia
  • JS Game Audio
    2010-10-26 – Level Up Game Jam, CDOT, University of York, Canada
  • Firefox4 Audio Data API
    2010-10-16 - Workshop - Music Hack Day, Boston
  • SceneBox Demo-tools with Web-Technology
    2010-09-17 - Bocoup Loft, Boston
  • Processing.js New Features & Tutorial
    2010-08-19 – Harvard College, Boston
  • The Future of Web Audio
    2010-07-08 - Mozilla Summit 2010, Whistler, Canada
  • The Future of Web Audio
    2010-05-12 - Bocoup Loft, Boston
  • Audio Data API Talk
    2010-04-28 - WWW2010, North Carolina
  • WebGL Demo Overload
    2010-04-17 - JSConf, DC
  • JavaScript Motion Graphics - Keynote
    2010-04-02 - Motion Graphics Festival Boston
  • Processing.js - UI Mechanics
    2010-03-17 - Bocoup Loft, Boston
  • Processing.js Workshop x2
    2009-11-21 - Music Hack Day, Boston
  • Creating an Animated Twitter Widget
    2009-10-30 - FSOSS University of York, Canada
  • A Crash Course in HTML5
    2009-09-11 - Microsoft NERD, Boston
  • Processing.js - The Death of Flash
    2009-04-30 - BarCamp4 MIT, Boston