About.

Subject

My name is Mark Thomas. I am a software engineer in the Los Angeles area, the author of React in Action (Manning Publications), and the keeper of this notebook.

I read more than I post. I keep things on paper as often as on a keyboard. The notebook you are looking at is my attempt to do the same on the open web: dated, durable, paginated in the order it was written.

Hand

I work mostly in JavaScript and the web platform, with regular detours into other languages and disciplines. The shape I aim for is T-shaped: one deep specialism, broad working knowledge across the rest. I have a weakness for beautiful systems, careful prose, and for tools that earn their keep.

This notebook

ifelse.io is where I keep field notes, longer essays, and the occasional photograph. It is set in et‑book and EB Garamond, served from Cloudflare, and built with Astro. Each entry is numbered in the order it was written, like the folios of a paper notebook.

Anything you read here was written by hand, mostly slowly. If something looks broken, that is a real bug and worth telling me about; if something looks unfinished, that is on purpose.