Harris Hudson

Harris 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

If you are seeking part-time or ad-hoc consultancy services, or coding expertise, for contemporary IT solutions in the database/web/GIS space - please reach out on the email address above.

Other Information

If you have come to this website in search of any of the following, please contact me on the email address above, or give me a call, so I can provide you a link.

My San Francisco 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. You can read more about my SF story here; mysfstory.

Visual Field

I developed Visual Field (https://visualfield.org) in late 2019 as an attempt to build a text and spatial enabled true server-less database functioning entirely within the browser. And I am continuing to maintain this application. I hope you can find it useful in your project.

Visual Field is largely written in vanilla HTML and vanilla Javascript but I also utilized some fantastic Open Source Javascript and CSS libraries. In these times where CORS enabled open datasets, along with edge and offline computing, are all now ubiquitous - I think having a standards based native SQL engine available in web browsers is perhaps long overdue. Visual Field is currently built upon WebSQL - which is an excellent browser based database. But WebSQL does have limitations - such as limited text and spatial capabilities. Visual Field attempts to fill in that missing ground. My hope was that the current W3 impasse in relation to WebSQL (still at 2023) will eventually get resolved and us developers can ultimately get access to a fully fledged native SQL engine running directly in the browser (whether that be WebSQL or some other standards based SQL engine). Come 2024 - it now looks like WebSQL is being deprecated from browsers without any standards based SQL engine to replace it built in to browsers. This is somewhat unfortunate to me that there will be no standards based SQL engine in browsers. However, on the flip side - whilst it wont be a standards based solution - the possibility of using SQLite wasm as an alternative SQL engine in the browser looks very promising. So I am hopeful I can look into a SQLite refactor effort for Visual Field in the near future.

If you get inspired when you play with Visual Field, please get in touch via the email address above.

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;