James Long's sketchbook
James Long — Design engineer, creator of Prettier and Actual
Visual design exploration, creative coding experiments, and developer tool building.
jlongster.comPart dev blog, part digital sketchbook. James Long — creator of Prettier and Actual — documents his creative experiments in real time: synth builders, DOM-warping visual effects, AI REPLs, and deep JavaScript explorations. Posts often include interactive demos you can play with directly in the browser, and the whole thing reads like watching a curious engineer think out loud.
Written by James Long since 2011.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
3
Independent Blog
English
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I got caught up in design again
Over a week ago, I had a thought: "I'm gonna make my website cool." I really love visual exploration. But there's a problem: given no constraints, it's so easy to get wrapped up into a one idea and go too far down that path. Here's what happened: I found a cool trick to "warp" real DOM elements. I took this approach to the extreme and tried to build my whole site around it. Here was one early version: I still really like this. It feels like my personal messy desk that that...
About
p { margin-top: 1.5em !important; margin-bottom: 1.5em !important; } ^ef0fc3 I’m James Long, and I love building products. You might know me as the creator of Prettier, absurd-sql, Actual, or maybe something else. I left Stripe in October and am currently looking for my next role (email me at longster@gmail.com). Please get in touch if I can help you! About me "Design engineer" is probably the best description of me. I love being creative and working closely with designers to buil...
Work
h2:first-of-type { margin-top: 0; } h2 { margin-top: 70px; margin-bottom: 30px; } details { font-size: 14px; margin-top: -0.5em; margin-bottom: 2.5em; } details h3 { font-size: 14px; } .entry { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; } .dates { color: var(--color-subdued); } p { margin-top: 1.5em !important; margin-bottom: 1.5em !important; } ^865093 Resume Stripe, Staff Engineer 2020-2025 At Stripe, I helped build a design system from scratch used...
Warp any DOM element with this bookmarklet
img { border: 1px solid #f0f0f0 } ^110e6b I've been working on a design and found a cool effect that would make a great bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a JS snippet that you can drag to your bookmarks bar and run on any page. If you've ever wanted to warp DOM elements on a page, you're dream has now come true. Here's what it looks like: Just drag this to your bookmarks bar and click it on any page: Bezier Transformer: Click any element to transform itPress ESC to cancel`;const closeBtn=document...
Building an AI REPL with QuickJS
Yesterday I did a livestream where I built a usable REPL with AI integration. Mostly from scratch, all in 3 hours. It uses a custom WASM build of QuickJS for evaluation. If the evaluation fails, it sends the text to Anthropic to speak to Sonnet 4.5. The idea was to meld a live evaluation environment together with AI. By using QuickJS as an evaluator, we get more than just a sandbox: we are able to inspect bytecode of functions, we could pause execution as needed, etc. I thought we might disc...
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If you love the intersection of creative coding and web craft — where building the tool is the point — James Long's experiments will keep surprising you.