Joe Morrison

A collection of my projects and articles over the years:

2025-Present: Miscellaneous writings

Miscellaneous writings on how to apply critical thinking and selling techniques to combat disinformation, escape echo chambers, and create more harmonious relationships with people you love (but disagree with).

2016-2024: Concourse

Founder and CEO of Concourse, where we pioneered the idea of creating more access to higher education by having universities apply to students, flipping the script on admissions. Sold the company to EAB in 2022.

2006-2010: My articles and presentations on various computer science topics

2003-2005: The Eleven programming language

An open source project I started to explore advanced ideas in web application state management. In conventional programming it's considered obvious to avoid global variables and use subroutines and local variables to abstract away stack-based storage management, but in web development we constantly put application state in globally accessible places like databases and cookies. Eleven pioneered a novel approach to disciplined and properly scoped state management in web applications.

1998-2003: The Linux distribution formerly known as e-smith

In 1998 Kim Morrison and I started a company called e-smith to commercialize a simplified Linux server distribution for small business, offering virus scanner updates, management, and other network services by subscription. We sold the company to Mitel in 2001 and the distribution changed hands several times, but 20 years later it's still maintained and available for download. It's now called the Koozali SME Server. Some of the history can be found here.

1990-1991: The Modalys computer music synthesis system

At the IRCAM computer music research lab in Paris, I developed a user interface for a new kind of computer music synthesis system based on physical modeling, building on underlying algorithms created by Jean-Marie Adrien. Called Modalys, the software continued to be developed over decades and is still in active use over 30 years later.