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Various projects

An list of things that have held space in my brain

2012-now

The older stuff is way more interesting, so starting with that:

  • I started messing around with games in 2012. Minecraft mods & servers, building my own versions of classics like Space Invaders, Super Mario, and Brick Breaker in Java / Swing / AWT. I found one of my first StackOverlow questions recently (I had zero online etiquette).
  • Started getting into building websites. I remember assigning our family computer a sticky IP on our router, serving some PHP (with XAMPP), writing down the IP address on a piece of paper (wasn't allowed a phone yet) and seeing if I could load the page from the school computer.
  • A friend and I started cold calling restaurants in our hometown to build them websites. One of them converted, first sale ever. We built them a custom CMS in PHP, didn't know any better.
  • I continued to build mobile games in Lua with friends. Flappy Bird came out and we built a Flappy Bird variant generator (custom images, custom rules, etc). It was something really jank like raw string replacements in Lua to generate new games. CodeDay 2016. Very funny code here.
  • Tried to build a sketch → website generator in C++ with OpenCV. The idea was to input a drawing of your website and get HTML + CSS back. Ended up with a demo that could match your sketched out box layout into a layouted HTML / CSS. More funny code here.
  • We also built a Spotify playlist downloader at a hackathon. We didn't have Spotify Premium, so the reasonable next step was to spin up EC2 instances with a VNC server + Spotify installed. Then use Linux's media bus to automate playing a specific playlist and record the system audio. For educational purposes, of course. Code here. I really liked PHP.
  • Built an app for my high school to manage club & sports announcements in 2017. We made everyone sign up at orientation. Someone found an XSS exploit that we had to patch (he hit us up instead of doing something nefarious, legend). Someone else was trying to run SQL injections (I thankfully knew to escape stuff by then). Bay Area high schoolers hacking each other's stuff for sport. Some funny memories here and here.
  • In the summers, a friend and I taught kids programming and game dev. Ended up being around 100 students across three years. Tbh we just hung out in my garage, made video games together and made some pocket money.
  • We also raised money in high school to build a couple computer labs for kids in India. Traveled to Gandhinagar & Ahmedabad, sourced PCs + desks + internet and set up 2 labs / 60 computers. Some of the kids were excited to write & print stories for their friends, others wanted to mess with MS Paint. Really cool experience. Also, taught a basic HTML / CSS class to high schoolers in Oakland (I think this was affiliated with Hack Club).
  • At some point in HS, a friend and I tried to build a video compression codec. We modeled simple animated video with Bezier curves and tracked motion frame-to-frame to reduce stored information. Of course, there was a huge quality loss and it wasn't that useful, but it was fun.
  • Also, played around with inductive touchscreens a bit. Built a demo that captured handwriting strokes and displayed them on screen real-time. Did some smoothing of the touch input with OpenCV. Not that practical, but the DECA judges loved it (we were pitching a notebook that would capture your handwritten notes).
  • One year at science fair, a friend and I built a power outlet adapter to eliminate standby power loss. We had a relay switch circuit + ammeter + a binary classifier running on a microcontroller to figure out when a device was actually in use vs. wasting electricity.
  • Did some ML stuff for various undergrad competitions: a breast cancer detection model using ultrasound images and a model for detecting falls from pose estimations for elderly people. First time doing full stack ML. Trained on a friend's GPU at home.
  • Built a quadcopter for a Berkeley embedded systems final project. It flew for a couple seconds.
  • Got into PCB design for a bit. I built a digital/analog hybrid breakout board for the ADS1298 IC for amplifying EEG signal. Learned some KiCad.
  • Built a trading engine in Rust for testing prediction market strategies. Lost some money and learned a lot about the quant stack. Will open source this soon.
  • Recently worked on a multi-agent orchestration project. AI-native Slack sort of thing, but with Mattermost. Thought a lot about modeling memory well, handling handoffs, and general orchestration. Might open source this, but there's a billion of these projects already.