About Me

Hi! I'm Jason Louv. This is a portfolio purely for the coding and technical side of my career.

I love code. I love code because it makes sense. I love code because if something doesn't work, it's not the code, it's you—and every time you find the answer, you learn a new skill. I love code because it doesn't care who you are or where you've been. I love code because it feels like magic.

I've lived my entire life inside computers, starting with the Apple Macintosh 512k in 1985, and have been on some version of the Internet since 1987, starting with Compuserve. I was soon making my own games with HyperCard and similar programs—skills that would later transfer to the Web. My first experiences with writing pure code were with BASIC, coding sprawling text adventures on an old Commodore 64 (and saving them to 5 1/4" floppies!)

The arrival of the Web in the early 1990s made the kind of intellectual life I wanted to live possible for me. I quickly learned HTML and spent much of the 90s designing Web sites, running BBSes and creating MUSHes using Perl. After doing an English degree next door to Silicon Valley at UC Santa Cruz, where I also spent time learning LISP for music theory (and hacked into early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld's private music server with a friend), I moved to New York to work for the Web 1.0 startup Disinformation, one of the early competitors in the search engine wars. Nearly all of my 20s were spent running blogs and content marketing for various companies, in addition to pursuing my own writing career, both through my own books and at sites like VICE Motherboard and Boing Boing.

It wasn't until I started my own business in 2013 (Ultraculture Incorporated) that I truly began to take code seriously. After a designer asked me for half of my startup in exchange for providing me with a WordPress theme (which he had downloaded from Envato!), I threw my hands up in frustration and decided to just do the tech side of the business myself. Diving into the WordPress ecosystem and community was a re-awakening to the Web, which had changed considerably since the 1990s, and the gateway drug of WordPress soon led to forays into JavaScript, Python, cloud services and lots, lots more. Within a few years, I had even consulted with Google's Artists and Machine Intelligence program.

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, much of which I have spent in solo isolation, I have re-committed myself to using this time to constantly stretching myself and improving my skills. You can see some of my current interests on the right.