Side Projects #
I write code in my spare time for the fun of it, and I have plenty of other hobbies, so most of these projects are incomplete. Check out the source code, though; I have put a lot of time into these babies over the years.
Raise Your Game #
TypeScript, React, GraphQL, MongoDB, Docker
This is a YouTube video annotation app. Plug in a URL, then when something interesting happens, just start typing. The video will pause until you hit Enter to submit the comment. Share the URL, and the recipient can see your comments appear as the video plays. I originally envisioned it as a way to share advice on gameplay footage, hence the name.
Written in TypeScript, with a MongoDB database. GraphQL for client/server communication. I’ve wanted to make this application for a while; you can see an unfinished Clojure version on my Github as well.
Mazes #
Clojure, ClojureScript, React
I spent a while working through Mazes for Programmers, by Jamis Buck. The book is written in Ruby, but I reimplemented many of the algorithms in Clojure. In Ruby, you get to implement the algorithms more or less the same way you might do them in C++, but Clojure requires a very different style. This has been a pleasant challenge.
In particular, check out the maze generation and pathfinding algorithms in this folder. There is also a React-based (via re-frame) front end application which demonstrates some of the algorithms.
Please check out the demo! I did an implementation of Dijkstra’s Algorithm that updates the maze visualization to show the algorithm’s update set as it tries to find the bottom-right cell of the maze.
The maze itself is rendered in SVG, all under control of React. After all, SVG is valid HTML, so React can efficiently update it. This opens interesting UI possibilities that aren’t already covered by existing component libraries.
Alpha Counter #
Clojure, ClojureScript, React
A life counter for the Yomi card game. Try it out at yomicounter.com: choose two characters, hit “Start Game”, then hit a few of the damage buttons and see what happens. Tap a life bar to change the target. The timing behind the combo damage accumulation and application is all done with core.async, Clojure’s equivalent of Go’s channel abstraction.
I wrote this because I didn’t like adding up damage mentally and tracking it on paper while playing the game. A great example of solving real-life problems with programming.
Raise Your Game (unfinished Clojure edition) #
Clojure, ClojureScript
See the finished TypeScript version at the top of this page.
Although this project was intended to become a Youtube annotation site, I got deeply sidetracked into Clojure database and testing code. Check out the server-side code and its tests for a good example of hand-rolled Clojure account management.
If I had to do it over again, to be honest, I would just use Rails with some plugins. The client side was going to be the really interesting part of this project! However, I will say that there is something really satisfying about slowly building up a framework of well-tested code.
Wrongtangular! #
ClojureScript
At Paperless Post, at one point, we needed to populate the rectangular?
attribute for thousands of paper graphics. We could not simply compare the width
and height of the graphics, because transparent and nearly-transparent pixels
greatly complicated the issue. Ultimately, we realized that a human would need
to evaluate each image.
To evaluate each image at a glance, instead of laboriously clicking through our
internal CMS, I created Wrongtangular!, a ClojureScript application which would
display image after image to its user. With fingers on the home row, the user
hits any right-side key to approve the image, and any left-side key to reject
it. Kind of like Tinder, but for whether graphics are rectangular.
Later, I realized that it might be useful to have such an application for any
arbitrary dataset and any boolean attribute. Hence Wrongtangulizer, a gem
meant to be used in the Paperless Post Rails REPL to generate instances of
Wrongtangular!.
underscore.as #
ActionScript
A simple port of most of underscore.js 1.3. This was extremely handy back when ActionScript was relevant, and I am still proud of a few of the hacks I used to get the concepts working in AS3’s less flexible runtime.
Everything Else on Github #
There are a lot of barely-started projects, sample code, and so on, but none of it is really worth reading.