WorldTree.Software

About JM Gustafson

Programmer, software architect, bachelor of science in computer science, author, speaker, musician, artist, runner, skier, backpacker, climber, veteran, father, son, human.

Contact me here.

JM Gustafson started off learning how to program on a Commodore VIC-20 in the 80's and hasn't stopped since. He has a degree in Computer Science and has been working with web technologies writing enterprise applications for nearly his entire career. Currently he spends most of his time writing web apps and services using TypeScript, React and AWS.

HTML5 Web Application Development by Example

In his free time, he enjoys writing and playing music, writing (for humans), and the outdoors. When he's not doing any of that, you can find him doing (what else?) more programming. These days he is particularly interested in writing web apps and games, which you can find on this web site.

JM Gustafson is the author of HTML5 Web Application Development by Example (ISBN: 9781849695947). This book teaches you the basics of writing HTML5 applications from start to finish. You'll learn by example how to create rich, interactive web applications from the ground up using HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery.

About WorldTree Software.

WorldTree Software was conceived by JM Gustafson in 1995. He was in college majoring in computer science at the time when he took three classes that put the gears in motion. The first was Introduction to Computer Programming. Although he had been programming on his own since the 80's, this was his first introduction to Windows programming (before that he programmed the VIC-20 and Amiga). The next class was Calculus. There he learned about derivatives and integrals and finding roots. The final class was Comparative Mythology. There he learned of the similarities between mythologies from around the world. One such archetype he learned about was the World Tree.

How did these three come together? JM was using one of those TI-85 graphing calculators in his calculus class. He also wanted something to program with his new Window's Pascal compiler. Then he thought, wouldn't it be great if you could do the graphing on a computer, with colored graphs and a large screen? So he sat down with his new found mathematical knowledge and hacked out a graphing program called QuickGraph. He decided to start selling it as shareware and needed a name for his new software company so he named it after that archetype from his mythology class. WorldTree Software was born.

Quickgraph did well as a shareware program (drop me a line if you remember it) but JM soon graduated and started working full time as a software engineer. This left little time to support Quickgraph so he dropped the project for a while. A couple years later his focus turned to developing online games using Java applets. He developed a couple of very popular online games under the WorldTree Software title; Santa's Helper and Stone Game.

In 2010 JM started to get interested in HTML5 and Javascript programming. Out of this new addiction came a whole host of web apps, many of which were ported from old Java applications. In 2011 the site got a complete makeover using HTML5.