Strategy, Engineering, and the Color of Success
An interactive color-data explorer built as a Node.js application, created with a Claude workflow. Dive into color datasets and visualizations directly in your browser.
Open chardata → View source on GitHub →First public release of chardata app.
Chardata is a node.js app designed to do simple inspection and comparison of color characterization data sets created using the CGATS file format (CSV also accepted), with or without spectral information.
If colorimetric information is missing, Chardata will use the spectral info to generate colorimetry.
Density information is discarded for now.
Plotting and comparison functions are available.
G7 validation is available with a detailed report.
Spectral plotting of single data points is also available.
Color Technology articles coming soon.
Recently I’ve started working on the characterization data (chardata) app and the enclosing website using Claude to handle my workflow. It’s definitely addictive, but there are clear limitations and hazards. I started work on the app as I needed something to do data extraction from CGATS files for another project I’m working on. In the…
My garden is choked with weeds. But you can learn from it and avoid choking your code with bugs. All it took was a season of neglect: “It’s raining too much.” “It’s too hot out.” “I’ll take care of it when the weather is nicer.” It’s like bugs and issues in software. Unlike gardens, bugs…
Socrates famously said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In the era of AI, we might also say “The unexamined code is not worth shipping.” I used to tell my team that writing a CGATS file parser is a rite of passage for a junior color code jockey. CGATS files are a venerable human-readable…
At our household, a favorite game is to throw different grocery names at the Alexa shopping list and see what the NLQ interpreter comes up with. For many items, like “milk” or “sourdough bread”, Alexa does pretty well across the household. For others, not so much. For example, “fried dough sticks”, which is an English…
There are 2 views of PMs I’ve worked with. PM as initiator — PM figures out why, what, and who. Everything else is someone else’s problem. PM as quarterback — PM is responsible for success of product, measured by the product P&L. Responsible doesn’t mean the PM does everything, but they’re responsible for ensuring it…
A recent story about an engineer who got fired because she was “difficult” reminded me of another incident from my own distant past, when we were just building up the cloud services dev team by expanding a team who had worked primarily on local apps in the past. At the time, we had a mixed…