I’m Ian. I live in the Bay Area, California. I used to work for Google, Looker, and other startups and companies. I've founded a game studio and the #1 pickleball website and app. I'm currently a Principal Engineer at North Pole Security working on macOS security products.

You might also be interested in my blog, my dotfiles, my link shortener, or my nostalgia-laden text adventure game at langworth.com. A long time ago, I also wrote a book on Perl.

You can follow me on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. You can subscribe to future posts via RSS or email.

A few of my open-source projects:

• 💾 dotfiles - my dotfiles, utils, Zsh/Vim/tmux/VS Code configs, and portable toolbox with an installer (Shell, ⭐️ 650+ stars!)

• 📦  jsgrids - source of jsgrids.statico.io, A comparison tool to compare JavaScript data grid and spreadsheet libraries (TypeScript, React, Next.js)

• 🕹️  langterm, glulxe-httpd, and The Archive - a WebGL/text-based interactive fiction game that powers langworth.com (TypeScript, JavaScript, WebGL, Node.js, Docker)

• 🔗  statico URL shortener - a custom URL shortener with a list of bookmarks I share often, which powers statico.link/ianl.link

• 👽 Imposter Attack - An Among Us-themed infrared shooting gallery game built with ESP32 devices and a Node.js scoreboard

• ⚙️ Ian's Stack (2025 Edition) - Fullstack example app with TypeScript and Postgres used as a starting point

• 🧙‍♂️ Godot Roguelike Example - Unfinished roguelike game made with Godot 4 with vision, inventory, BSP dungeon generation, behavior trees, and more

• 🟧 ycombinator1.com - a proxy and Slack app to show social media previews for Hacker News links

Vibe-coded funsies:

• 👾 GBHack: Dungeons of Doom - A roguelike dungeon crawler for the Game Boy Color, inspired by NetHack

• 🚀 SpaceMolt - "A free multiplayer game built for AI agents. Explore. Trade. Battle. Build empires across the stars." (Home page: https://www.spacemolt.com)

• 🪐 smui - A dark terminal-aesthetic theme for shadcn/ui. Nord-inspired colors, JetBrains Mono everywhere, zero border radius

• 🩻 nobg - Generate images with transparent backgrounds using AI chroma key compositing

• 🎆 guff - Generate animated GIFs using AI — Claude writes code that programmatically creates SVG animation frames

• 🌌 meshtastic-cli - Terminal UI for monitoring Meshtastic mesh networks - view packets, nodes, and chat in real-time

• 🔍🤖 quickrag - A fast and flexible RAG tool for indexing and querying documents

• ♟️ Chess Puzzles macOS menubar item - Solve chess puzzles directly from your macOS menu bar

• 🧒 kidcode - A kid-friendly web app that wraps Claude Code CLI to let kids build things with AI through a chat interface

• 🧑‍💻 llmscript - Write your shell scripts in natural language by using an LLM to write and test them for you

Older / archived:

• 📈 femtostats - a self-hostable, privacy-focused web analytics platform and alternative to Google Analytics

• 📖 aspen - a search engine for gigs of plaintext data built with React and ElasticSearch

• 🌈 cadubi - a terminal-based color ASCII art editor I wrote in 1997 that is now somehow included in many package managers and software archives

Important

Enjoy this cat: