My interests can sometimes be wide ranging and involved a number of different technology stacks including .NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC and javascript/node.js.
I tend to get interested in a new piece of tech, and according to my wife, almost obsessive, for a bit of time before moving on to something else. I like to think this makes me well rounded, but ADD is also an almost apt description.
PygmentSharp
I was working on my own blog generator, and needed some syntax highlighting. Theres a popular python package called pygments and I started porting what I needed to C#. I don’t know python, so it was a fun challenge understanding its idioms and coming up with the correct C# translation.
One of my first projects to get pull requests!
Electric Field Hockey
When I was in high school, we had to play a game in our physics class to push a positive charge past some obstacles using other electric charges. In college I built a .NET clone as an exercise when we covered electric fields in Physics 102. This year, I rebuilt it in javascript and HTML5 canvas.
It has user signups, very clumsy level creation, scoreboards, and replays. I want to eventually add a full-featured online level editor and administrative controls for editing other user’s levels.
You can play it at electricfieldhockey.com or look at the code for the game and backend on GitHub.
Landmine
In a previous position, I had been a .NET developer using C# to build mostly accounting integrations. My web development experience in .NET was limited to a bit of maintenance and flailing around to build a simple form-to-database page. I wanted to see how I liked building websites on Microsoft’s platforms and to discover how ASP.NET MVC compared to Ruby on Rails.
What better way to do that than to build yet another canvas game?
Over the course of a couple weeks, I whipped out Landmine: my second foray into derivative online game play. It’s kind of a minesweeper clone built with ASP.NET MVC5, using Entity Framework 6 as the ORM. I wanted to go all out with Microsoft technologies, so I figured out how to use SASS and TypeScript within Visual Studio before hosting it on Azure Websites.
You can play it at www.landminegame.com or check out the code for the game and website on GitHub.
Breaking Bricks
My wife remarked that she wished she could get notified when certain LEGO products were starting to retire. So I of course I had to write a cron job that would send notifications via twitter. Hence: Breaking Bricks.
Like “Breaking News”, get it?
I know. I should stick to engineering and let creative people name things.
Its a Ruby on Rails app that checks the Lego website 4 times per day and looks for products that are on the Retiring and On Sale lists. If it notices a change to either list, it tweets an alert via @breaking_bricks. I’d like to eventually provide an accompanying website that displays scraped details about the products. But for now, its just a glorified cron job!
Samples
Sample and demo projects.