Are you Pat, or JK?
The name “PAT or JK” is slightly confusing since it refers to only one person, me (Patrick Gillespie). The name was coined way back in the mid-nineties when my brother and I were faced with coming up with an AOL screen name that we would both have to share. After numerous attempts at trying to come up with something clever and under 10 characters (why they had that limit I don’t know) the name “PAT or JK” suddenly came to me. It made sense because my name was Pat and my brother used “JK” as his alias in the video game world.
The odd ball name ended up sticking and I found it helped people remember who I was since it stuck out. Eventually my brother got his own online screen name and I was left with PAT or JK to use just for myself.
Site History
I got interested in programming during the summer of 1997, and somehow found my way into the AOL prog world (programs that manipulated AOL). In 1998 I opened a GeoCities page entitled “The PAT or JK Webpage!” that contained programs and programming examples. The site slowly grew, and sometime in 1999 I moved it to its own domain: patorjk.com.
Back then it was focused on Visual Basic, and it even had a lively forum that served as a hang-out for a lot of young developers. Around 2001, though, college became my main focus, and work on this site began to slow down.
In January 2007, I relaunched the site around the idea of it being a creative outlet. By then the forum was long dead (I still miss the old camaraderie), and the Visual Basic content wasn’t much of a draw, though I archived it for nostalgic reasons. Over the next few years I released a bunch of online apps, things like the TAAG and my typing speed test, with varying success.
Around 2014 my interest shifted to photography, and I spent the next decade making far fewer updates. Between 2007 and 2014, I wrote over 200 blog posts. Between 2015 and 2024, I wrote 22.
What I find funny is that during my “lost decade” this site became more popular than it had ever been (2018 is still its best performing year). While I was off chasing sunrises and learning to edit photos, the apps I’d made between 2007 and 2014 gradually found an audience.
In 2025 I restarted my YouTube channel and that reignited my interest in this site. Since then I’ve been going back and polishing up old apps and making a few new ones along the way. I hope to continue to create and update, and it’s neat to think about how long this site has been around.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy your time here. Be sure to bookmark it if you like it!
How can I contact you?
My email is [email protected]
Picture
An artist’s rendering of what I look like:
