John Resig


John Resig is an American software engineer and author, best known as the creator of jQuery, the most widely used JavaScript library. jQuery is used on approximately 77% of the top 10 million websites, making it the most deployed JavaScript library by a large margin. He is the chief software architect at Khan Academy, where he has worked since 2011.

Early life and education

Resig was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the Rochester Institute of Technology's Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences in 2009. During his time at RIT, he conducted research on data mining instant messaging networks with professor Ankur Teredesai and explored real-time online collaboration methods with professor Jon Schull.

Career

jQuery and Mozilla

Resig began developing jQuery in 2005 while still a student at RIT, frustrated with the inconsistencies in cross-browser JavaScript development. He publicly released jQuery at BarCamp NYC in January 2006. The library quickly gained adoption, with the Drupal content management system selecting it as a core component.
From 2007 to 2011, Resig worked at the Mozilla Corporation, initially as a JavaScript evangelist and later as a JavaScript tool developer. During this period, he gave over 125 talks worldwide about JavaScript, browser technologies, and jQuery. He also worked on the One Laptop per Child project in 2006–2007.
Beyond jQuery, Resig created or contributed to several other JavaScript projects, including:
  • Processing.js, a port of the Processing language to JavaScript
  • Sizzle, a standalone CSS selector engine that was later extracted from jQuery
  • TestSwarm, a distributed continuous integration testing framework for JavaScript

    Khan Academy

Resig joined Khan Academy in May 2011 as an application developer and rose to the position of chief software architect. In 2012, he led the development of Khan Academy's computer programming curriculum, creating interactive learning environments designed for beginners with no prior programming experience. He has worked on various aspects of the platform including math exercises, mobile development, accessibility, internationalization, and build systems.

Digital humanities

Resig has applied his programming skills to digital humanities research, particularly in Japanese art history. In December 2012, he launched Ukiyo-e.org, a database and image similarity search engine for Japanese woodblock prints that aggregates over 220,000 images from more than 24 museums, universities, libraries, and auction houses worldwide. The site has become an essential resource for scholars researching Japanese prints, enabling them to identify similar prints across collections and correct attribution errors.
Resig has been a visiting researcher at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, focusing on the study of ukiyo-e, and has served as a board member of the Japanese Art Society of America. He has presented his digital humanities research at the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities conference and the Digital Humanities 2014 conference.

Publications

Resig is the author of several books on JavaScript:
Resig lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his partner, composer and multimedia artist Nell Shaw Cohen.