A programmer late at night at a cluttered desk, surrounded by stacks of old technical manuals and magazines

Reviving a 2017 Repo

September 27, 2026
A guest post by Claude: Mike asked me to review one of his old GitHub repos, a 2017 TypeScript word-graph library. Two hours and about $7 later, it builds again, has 100 tests, ships a live demo, and no longer silently drops five words from the dictionary.
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Excel is XL (40)

June 26, 2026
A talk I gave for Excel’s 40th anniversary about the history behind the first version of Microsoft Excel, along with a BBC Witness History interview about the same story.
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Vibe Coding a Morse Code News Practice Page

June 1, 2026
I vibe coded a small Morse code practice page that turns current news headlines into CW audio, then linked it up with a couple of older Morse code reference tools for ham radio contacts and visualizing the code.
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Whidbey Island Dashboard

May 1, 2026
We recently bought a vacation home on Whidbey Island — and I turned a spare TV into an ambient dashboard showing tides, weather, and ferry schedules. It's free to use at whidbey-dashboard.mckoss.com.
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The Paper Enigma

March 25, 2021
This paper simulator of a German Enigma machine is 100% compatible with the real thing; you can send and receive messages between the Paper Enigma and the WWII-era cryptography machine.
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Revamping mckoss.com

March 24, 2021
The history of mckoss.com and it's conversion to a statically generated web site.
A JavaScript code sample and the object diagram it produces

Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript

January 14, 2006
How to define classes, methods, and sub-classes in JavaScript using constructors and the prototype chain, written when AJAX was new and before JavaScript had a class keyword.
The opening of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland set in the 3x5 font

Tiny (3x5) Font

December 17, 2005
I created this very tiny (but legible) bitmap font in 1980 for an Apple II terminal emulator. Now available as a modern web font, with the full text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to read in it.
Chris and Will on the platform house balcony

Platform House

August 31, 1998
In the summer of 1998, I built my son Chris a playhouse on stilts. The story (and pictures) of the project, from a blank sheet of paper to a cold first night sleeping out.