What's with all the balls?

Fair question. They’re in the logo. They wander around the home page, pile up in the footer, and bounce onto the end of quotes. If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with all the little balls, here’s the honest answer.

Seven portfolios

I have something like seven versions of a portfolio website on my computer.

Every one of them was built by a nervous version of me. What will a potential employer think? What will other developers think? What about clients? How do I make this look professional? Those questions picked every font, every colour and every line of copy. The results were tidy and sensible. They just weren’t me.

It took building a lot of them to notice the pattern. Sharing things with the world is scary, and I’d been letting the fear do the designing.

So I stopped trying to make a portfolio and started making something that looks like me. Something that reflects who I am and what I care about. And I’m a bit different. I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic, sometimes to a fault. I want to be someone who’s full of life, and I want to play.

My first word was ball

My first word was ball. Looking back, that was a pretty clear sign of what was coming.

I’ve always wanted to play and be silly. I was the kid in class getting kicked out for making weird noises and cracking jokes, and getting sent to the principal’s office for it. After school I was outside. Soccer balls, hockey balls, ripping around the neighbourhood on a skateboard and coming home with my knees cut up.

That’s who I am. I didn’t want to hide that kid behind a professional-looking grid anymore.

So I drew where it all comes from: a creative reflection of my childhood, and the playful things that shape this site.

Draw again

It’s drawn live, in code, every time this page loads.

The ball pit

If you were a kid in the 90s, you know the ball pit. The one at McDonald’s. The one at IKEA. A net, a slide, and a sea of plastic balls in every colour. I played in both when I was little, and I’m not sure I ever really climbed out.

That’s the key pit, by the way: the navigation at the bottom of the home page, where each key takes you to a different part of the site. When I built it, that was exactly what I was picturing: a ball pit you’re allowed back into.

Where the balls come from

My brain moves fast. It goes all over the place, picks something up, drops it, chases the next thing. That’s where the balls come from.

Software is moving like that too. Faster than it ever has. What we can make, and how quickly, is a little ridiculous. The opportunities feel endless, and every week brings a new model, a new tool, and a new reason to feel behind.

Ideas are the easy part. The work is taking all those colours and all that noise and lining them up into something that actually matters to a person. That’s why the balls exist.

You can see it in the logo at the top of the home page. “jhart” is solid. “codes” is made of bubbles, and about half of them wander off around the page. Bring your pointer close and they fly back into their letters. Run it through them and they scatter, squash a little, and spring back into place. They never overlap. They always find their spot.

They always line up

There’s a lot of movement in the world right now. Change on top of change. New models, real fear about AI, and a lot of noise about what’s coming next. Some days it feels like every bubble is flying off in a different direction.

The hope of this whole site is pretty simple. Through all of that, the balls line up. I can still take the chaos and make something that has value. Something beautiful, made for people.

“Through all the noise, the balls always line up.”

So that’s what these ball-looking bubbles are. Mostly, they’re me. The kid who couldn’t sit still, still bouncing around, trying to make everything land in the right place.

Go push them around on the home page. They’ll come back.