Travis Briggs
I am a web developer and professional (*) musician living in San Francisco, CA, USA.
This is my personal website, where you will find links to most of my online digital creations.
Contact information
Music I've Made
I've been writing songs since I was 12 years old (hasn't everyone?) but I've really gotten serious about it in the past three or four years.
Danger Third Rail
My "band" is called Danger Third Rail. Band is in quotes because it's more of a recording project, where I write all the songs and play all the instruments. If you like anything you hear on this site and do want to start a band or let me join yours, please reach out!
As of September 2019 I have recorded a single (Pink Fluffy Cloud) and a 5 song EP (Radio Machine) as Danger Third Rail. The songs are available on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, etc. But you should really click the link to find out more.
Original Songs
As of 2018, I started running out of space on my Soundcloud account. Again. Yes, that's right, I was already paying for a so-called "Pro" account, and they apparently wouldn't let me upload any more and wanted me to upgrade to a "Pro Unlimited" account.
Instead, I downloaded everything off Soundcloud using their API, and built a custom static site generator (called Rainfall, which I open-sourced) to serve it. That site is at songs.travisbriggs.com and you should visit it if you want to hear my latest music.
Otherwise, you can still find more on my Soundcloud.
Blogging and me
Blogging, like editing Wikipedia, is something I always wish I did more of. Over the years, my blogging practice has lapsed more than it has thrived. As of February 2019, I have relaunched my blog at:
Previously, in September 2014, I launched a Medium blog at:
That was back before Medium got all monetized and you could still add a custom domain for free. I'm grandfathered in on that one.
I am always ambivalent between the excitement of publicly sharing my ideas with the world, and the fact that it makes me extremely vulnerable to people looking me up online. I discuss this more in this blog post.
Random writings
Not exactly blog posts, per se, here are a bunch of creative writings I've done over the years. The website is opressively minimalist and the dates are the publication dates, not necessarily when I original wrote the works.
Online Digital Art Gallery
I've put together a small collection of 3D and 2D artworks I've created over the years. Some of them have accompanying music.
The 3D art is done primarily in Three.js, a 3D Javascript creation tool that leverages the HTML5 <canvas> element and WebGL.
The 2D artworks are older and done in Processing.js which is a Javascript port of the Java Processing framework.
In case it's not clear, the source code for all of the animations is available on the their respective pages, and is freely available for anyone to use.
Best Albums In The Universe
I have started a project to catalog all of the best albums in the universe, since I primarily listen to full commercial albums (not playlists or shuffle!) when enjoying music.
RGB of Life
The idea is to encompass Conway's Game of Life in each bit of the 24 bit RGB color space. The text on the site sort of explains it, but basically, you only need a grid of 1 bit to play a game of life:
0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0
Where the "1" values are alive and the "0" values are dead. However, colors in CSS (the styling system of the web) are specified using 24 bits. So you can play 24 simutaneous "games of life", one for each bit of the RGB color space.
The higher order bits contribute more to the overall color components of a square, with the left-most bits contributing half the value. So, starting with completely random colors, the grid seems to settle into shades of Cyan, Yellow and Magenta (close to R/G/B).
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the awesome contribution of my co-worker Sagar Mittal. He really took the idea and ran with it, expanding it to the full screen, using HTML 5 canvas, and generally making it fast and awesome.
Neural Noise
Neural noise is a project to generate music using recurrent neural networks. The music is represented in the textual abc notation format. Read more on the project's about page.
Travis Briggs on Github
Although I don't have any one particularly noteworthy project on Github, I have amassed a good quantity of code on the site over the years.
About
Travis Briggs earned his BS in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is a software developer, amateur musician, and blogger. All of these skills come together on his personal website, located at travisbriggs.com (this website!)
Travis' professional specialties center around open source web application development and all of the modern tools that enable this task: "scripting" languages such as Ruby, Javascript, Python and — to a lesser extent — PHP; data stores such as MySQL, MongoDB and Cassandra; servers such as nginx and Apache; and various other client and server side technologies.
At WPI, Travis earned a minor in Music and was the President and Music Director of the all-male a cappella group Simple Harmonic Motion. He was also music director — and performed improvised music for — WPI's comedy improvisation group Guerilla Improv. Previously, Travis has written and recorded his own music, and has performed at open mic nights and as a busker in Cambridge, MA USA. He is now living in San Francsico, CA USA.
* Technically I am a professional musician because in three years of having my songs on Spotify/iTunes/Google Play Music I have made about 27 dollars. So I have been paid for making music. But I certainly don't derive my primary income from making music.
