Harris Hudson

Hi, my name is Harris and I am a retired IT professional (after a 36 year career). I am located somewhere between sunny Canberra ACT Australia and foggy San Francisco CA USA, or beyond. These days I enjoy many other activities and coding projects outside of work.

Email: harris@harrishudson.com

My USA Experience 2019 - San Francisco Story & New York Story

If you have come to this website in search of my San Francisco experience in 2019 - then you are in the right place. I wrote the core initial version of Visual Field after I found myself unemployed for an extended period of time when living in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2019. Here, you can read more about my San Francisco Story. And here, is my New York Story - which interestingly occurred less than 48 hours prior to major events in my San Francisco Story.

Opinion & Analysis

Over the years I have developed strong views on two topics that intersect closely with my work on open data and browser-based applications. I have written these up as longer articles:

In the Age of AI, Is Open Data Still Open? — How compulsory API keys, introduced by platforms such as Socrata to manage AI-driven load on civic data portals in cities including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Seattle, may be quietly eroding the foundational non-discrimination principles of the Open Data movement.

Whatever Happened to WebSQL? — A browser-native relational SQL database arrived in 2009, was never properly standardised, was progressively mangled over fifteen years through successive removal of its capabilities, and was finally deprecated in 2024 without a standards-based replacement. The web ecosystem is poorer for it, and the question the standards community set aside in 2010 has still not been answered.

Other Information

If you have come to this website in search of any of the following, and there is no link, please contact me on the email address above, or give me a call, so I can provide you a link.

• My Resume
• Portfolio examples of web based visualisation work
• Location and visitor information for my family rural property
• Instructions to my off-grid cabin
• Wildlife and other property photographs and recordings
• Other photograph collections
• A write up about our rural 4g-Wifi Transponder (Internet Relay)
• 2019 rural property bushfire photographs

Visual Field

I developed Visual Field in late 2019 as an attempt to build a text and spatial enabled true server-less database functioning entirely within the browser.

Come 2024, sadly WebSQL has now been deprecated without any HTML standards based relational database replacement being provided in modern browsers. I am currently assessing rewriting Visual Field to use the SQLite wasm engine. But this will be a major undertaking and wont be a HTML standards based solution. Stay tuned.

Vista Manifest

I developed Vista Manifest in late 2024 as an Open Source website to showcase a small collection of Live Earth, Weather and Climate visualizations based on real Open Data datasets. Behind the scenes - this makes use of my CFRender project - which I have also recently updated. This showcases how I believe javascript can interact with THREDDS data servers to, hopefully, encourage people to consider new ways of presenting their live weather and climate data going forward in to the future. See some Simple Demo's and Example screen recordings here. I also presented some of this work at the NCI (ANU Supercomputing Infrastructure) in December 2024 and they posted this NCI News Article in May 2025. I will also be showcasing this website (vistamanifest.com) as part of my FOSS4G2025 presentation in November 2025 - See next section.

FOSS4G 2025

After securing some funding, I was delighted to be able to attend and present my talk Improving Climate Data Delivery and Visualisation on Wednesday 19th November 2025 at this years FOSS4G 2025 in Auckland New Zealand. It was a great experience meeting like minded people, attending functions, and helping out here and there by chairing some sessions. Here is a Summary of my presentation. And a YouTube recording of my talk (23mins).

Code Repo

https://github.com/harrishudson

I have made a small number of my coding projects Open Source. You can find these at my code Repo. These include;

• Leaflet.zoomSVG A Leaflet 2D SVG Renderer that does not re-project or redraw features upon map zoom change.
• Visual Field Process and Visualize your data sets directly in your browser. Ideal for online, edge computing and offline scenarios.
• Speedo Speedometer (with HUD mode and limit warning). Demo; harrishudson.com/speedo.
• Geo Join Simple Opt-In Location Sharing. Demo; geojoin.org.
• CFRender A NetCDF CF Grid Rendering Toolkit.
• VisionSphere Camera Motion Detection for Raspberry Pi's. Write-up featured in Core Electronics.
• VistaManifest Visualizations of Climate Forecasting Open Data. Live site; vistamanifest.com. Demo recordings.
• Latest Obs Latest Australian Weather Observations.
• selfkept Offline-first HTML tools for encrypted field logging and encrypted notes.
• osm-gps-html A single-file, self-contained GPS navigator for the browser.
• Sky Junk A visible satellite tracker. Demo; skyjunk.org

Provenance of Works

All code, names, logos, and marks used in my GitHub repositories listed above are original works. Prior to selection, due diligence was conducted for each repository name, logo, and mark. Any third-party code incorporated into my work has been properly attributed. At the time of creation, no formal trademarks existed worldwide for any of the names or marks used for these type of works.

I assert common law trademark rights to these names and marks, which predate any subsequent trademark applications by other parties for identical or confusingly similar marks. Evidence of prior use can be verified through initial GitHub repository commit timestamps and documentation of continuous public usage.

None of the listed works are abandoned. Should any work be discontinued, it will be removed from this above Code Repo listing.