Projects¶
The vast majority of my projects are open source and can be found on GitHub. This is a list of projects I’ve written or contributed to in some way. I love discussing them, so feel free to ask me about them.
Shader Playground¶
shader-playground is a learning project of mine, the code isn’t the prettiest but has given me a lot of understanding of the shader pipeline and graphics programming in rust. Also, this project I spent time playing with fractals like Mandelbrot and Buddahbrots.
- Created a bunch of art, learning about how to generate and save it in various formats.
- Gained a deeper understanding of complex numbers and various ways to think about them.
- Was able to transfer this knowledge to other game development projects I have in progress, making them more technically solid as well as convenient features like screenshotting and debug output.
Message Broker¶
Message Broker was a project where I attempted to write an enterprise worthy message broker akin to RabbitMQ, Kafka, or Redis’ Pub/Sub layer. I planned on open sourcing once I got it to a usable state, but work and other side projects took precedence.
- Building on top of Tokio which is becoming a community standard for building services, protocols, and as a layer to manage async machinery.
- I’m also writing a best practices book to go along with it, as an exercise in that type of writing. This way I design the message broker in a usable way that encourages good system architecture.
md-to-wp¶
md-to-wp is a small rust project I coded up in an afternoon to convert markdown to a WordPress friendly HTML. This includes colorizing my code examples. You can see it in action this blog post.
i-can-manage-it¶
i-can-manage-it is a game and game engine I started writing to get used to the world of game development. I haven’t open sourced it yet, but I did do some writing about it as I learned and encountered problems.
- First Rust project where performance really mattered, so I got to spend some time optimizing.
- Had to learn and relearn linear algebra in order to do the coordinate transforms to do camera effects and object manipulation I wanted.
- Wrote a debug socket server that I hooked up to an Electron project that displayed stats about my running game engine.
cargo-bump¶
cargo-bump is a command that increases the version number of the Rust project you are currently in. It is meant to be a Rust version of npm version.
- A fun exercise in gluing libraries together in Rust.
- An interesting opportunity to work with others in the community who are writing Rust libraries.
- Started as a challenge to myself to build a Rust project from scratch in a night.
WeeChat Notifier¶
weechat-notifier is a daemon written in Rust meant to connect to a running WeeChat session on another machine and provide notifications on the local machine. I am writing it mostly as an experiment in writing a parser, client library, and a daemon in Rust.
- Learned a valuable lesson about how writing a parser in a static language like you would in a dynamic language results in cumbersome code.
- Had a lot of fun experimenting with different testing styles.
Read the Docs¶
Read the Docs is a site for building and hosting sphinx documentation. The main goal of it is to lower the barrier to writing docs as much as possible. The idea is that if there is free hosting, automated building, and easy to select themes developers would write docs. Once they are written maintaining them is easy because when you push your docs are automatically rebuilt.
What I did for the project:
- Core developer/maintainer on the project for a couple years.
- Wrote better integration with GitHub, including tests.
- Made it possible for multiple people be admins on a project.
- Took part in architecture discussions with the maintainer.
- Took over maintainership for 4 months while the previous maintainer was away.
ZenIRCBot¶
ZenIRCBot is a IRC bot that works a bit differently than your standard bot. Features (and interesting to implement things) include:
- Microservice architecture
- Redis pub/sub as a transport
- Services can be written in any language.
- Core bot written in Node.js but reference implementations are also in Python and Clojure.
- Patched various third party libraries to enable features in each of the bots.
PDXNode¶
This is less a software project and more a project that revolves around, software. I was a co-organizer for the group for years, which meant planning meetings, getting speakers, running workshops, and more.
- Once a month software hack night that I mentored at.
- Once a month hardware hack night which I was a core mentor for.
- Once a month presentation night, some months I filled in if we couldn’t find a speaker.
- Periodic workshops, some I was the main organizer, others I was just a mentor.
Hardware¶
Since July or so of 2013, I’ve become a hardware hacker to complement my software development skills. It is really great being able to interact with the real world, not just via a keyboard or mouse or something.
- Built a monitoring system for my house, temp, light, humidity and cat door.
- Built a media keyboard (play/pause/back/forward/volume) where I had to patch the firmware that comes with the chip to better adhere to the USB HID spec.
- In the process of building a bike computer with GPS, heart rate, cadence and a light system.
- In the process of building a monitoring system for my smoker.