John Nelson
About Me
Worked as the lead software engineer at bffa.org creating intuitive user interfaces- 🎓 Trained professionally in software development Alchemy Code Lab in 2019
- ⛑ Former Firefighter, EMT-Paramedic, and Emergency Room Technician
- 🐕🦺 Training a rescued husky malamute mix named Zuko for therapy
- 🥾 Can be found hiking the trails around Portland with dogs
- ⛷ Active with snow sports, especially skijoring
- 🧠 Nerd for sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books
- ⛵️ Enjoy building Lego's and models
- 🪴 Caretaker of many houseplants
- 🌱 Currently learning NextJS
Projects
🤗 empathetech.org
A hug-o-tron community. Beep beep boop boop.
Personal contributions:
- 🤖 Created navigation bar, footer, and code of conduct components for the website
- 👨🏻🏫 Biweekly Office Hours: Led demonstrations on using D3.js with React
Collaborated using GitHub for issues, code reviews, and pull requests- 🔧 Technical expert with Black Business Association of Oregon
🧰 Next.JS, React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
Better Future For All
(BFFA.org)Using art to promote measuring and improving a society's ability to meet people's basic needs, empower communities, and unlock individual potential.I created intuitive tools for exploring the SPI framework from the Social Progress Imperative
BFFA Map and Tooltip
View scores from around the world at a glance
Measuring 169 countries 3 dimensions 4 components 60 indicators in total
🧰 Tools: React, D3.js, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
🌸 Inspired by Shirley Wu's Film Flowers
🎨 Iconography by Wakey Nelson
BFFA Stamp Book
Explore each component's definition and sources
🧰 Tools: React.js, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
🗜 Testing: Jest
🎨 Artwork by Jannah Minnix
📓 Physical stamp book available at bffa.org
🔭 Image of the Day from NASA's API
What's not to love about staring at the stars and ultra hd images of them?
Here I am making an API call to NASA, lazily because they love large image sizes.
A Year of Sunspots
How many sunspots can you see? The central image shows the many sunspots that occurred in 2025, month by month around the circle, and all together in the grand central image. Each sunspot is magnetically cooled and so appears dark -- and can last from days to months. Although the featured images originated from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, sunspots can be easily seen with a small telescope or binoculars equipped with a solar filter. Very large sunspot groups like recent AR 4366 can even be seen with eclipse glasses. Sunspots are still counted by eye, but the total number is not considered exact because they frequently change and break up. Last year, 2025, coincided with a solar maximum, the period of most intense magnetic activity during its 11-year solar cycle. Our Sun remains unpredictable in many ways, including when it ejects solar flares that will impact the Earth, and how active the next solar cycle will be.
🔩 API call made to
https://api.nasa.gov/index.html
using
Tanstack / react-query
Want to know more? Let's connect!
